LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



J'JL 15 1«ft5 



Features of Society 



In ®15 attli in Mm €tt0lan^. 



HENRY MANN, 



AUTHOR OF 



" Ancient and Medieval Republics.' 



rs^r 



;:?^>y-^ 



Providence : 
SIDNEY S. RIDER 

1885. 



'^1 



To 

Mr. ALEXANDER MANN, 
OP Swindon, Wilts, England, and formerly of 
Aberdeen, Scotland, 
These Thoughts are Inscribed, 

By His Son, 

THE AUTHOR. 



Copyright, 1885, by Henry Mann. 



PREFACE. 



Of British birth and training, I began to reside 
in New England at an age sufficiently mature for 
the memories of the Old World to be enduring, 
while my mind was yet plastic enough to receive 
fair and unprejudiced impressions of the New. 
The following pages, therefore, so far as they 
apply to New England, are not the crude com- 
ments of a sojourner, or the hasty observations 
of a traveler. They are the fruit of thought and 
of experience, on the farm, in the office, in the 
court, in all the varied phases of life of which 
an employe in journalism is a witness, and often 
a part. The articles in reply to Mr. Mallock's 
work on Property and Progress appeared origi- 
nally as editorial contributions in the columns of 
the Providence yoiirnaL 



iv Preface. 

I take the opportunity to thank the critics of 
the press, at home and abroad, who reviewed 
my former work on Ancient and Medimval Re- 
-publics^ and I think it due to myself to add a 
brief explanation. The writer of the very cour- 
teous and intelligent criticism in the New York 
Star did me the honor to suggest that I had 
consulted Mr. Lecky's History of European 
Morals, I simply reply that I never read a line 
of Mr. Lecky's most interesting volumes until 
after my own book was in type. I make the 
same answer to the suggestion of the World in 
regard to Sir Henry Sumner Maine. This con- 
fession is perhaps not to my credit ; but it is none 
the less true. Whether the ideas in Ancient and 
MedicBval Refuhlics were valuable or poor, they 
were at least original ; and I can say the same 

of this little book. 

The Author. 

North Providence, R. I., May 15, A. D. 1885. 



CONTENTS. 



A REPLY TO MR. MALLOCK. 



Communism not an American Question, 

An Exotic in England, 

Weakness of Mr. Mallock's Case, 

Labor and Capital, 

Population and Subsistence, 

Motives for Emigration, . 

The English Food Supply, 

Property and Poverty, 

The State as Landlord, 



PAGE 

I 
3 
4 
6 
8 

9 

II 

12 



11. FROM ABSTRACT REASONING TO FACTS. 

The Owners of the Land, i? 

Interesting Figures, 19 

Aristocratic Incomes, ....... 21 

Advantages of Land-Ownership, 22 

The Throne and the People, 24 

Comparison of Incomes, ....••• 25 

The Question at Issue, . . . . . • .26 

Popular Sentiment, ......•• 28 

Primogeniture and Entail, ...... 29 

Comfort and Agitation, 3^ 



VI 



Contents. 



ELEMENTS OF SOCIETY IN NEW ENGLAND. 



Office Open to All, .... 

Native Dislike of the Irish, 

The English in New England, . 

English Labor Agitators, . 

Native Prejudice against the English, 

The Scotch in New England, . 

The Germans, ..... 

The French-Canadians — The Negro, 

New England Impressions of the Negro, 

Discrimination against the Colored Race, 

Morality among the Negroes, . 

An Aristocracy of Workers, 

Gold not Alone a Key, . . . , 

American Exclusiveness, . . . . 



34 
35 
37 
38 
40 

41 
42 

43 
44 
45 
47 
48 

49 
50 



THE NATIVE FARMER. 



Pride of Ancestry, 
The Farming Influence, 
Individuality and Self-Reliance, 
Gnarled and Knotty Families, . 
The Farmer's Dwelling, 
How Farmers Live, . 
A Darker Phase of Country Life, 
Out-of-the-way Homes, 
Causes of Degradation, 



54 
55 
56 
57 
59 
60 
62 
63 



Private Graveyards, ....... 64 

History in Headstones, ....... 67 



Contents. 



vu 



SMALL FAMILIES. 

A Delicate Subject, 69 

Social Sentiment, 70 

Motives for Prevention, . 71 

An Injury to the State, 72 

No Prospect of Reform, 73 

DIVORCE. 



The Domestic Equality of Woman, 
Abuse of the Divorce Laws, 
Benefits of Liberal Divorce, 
Drunkenness and Divorce, 
Crusade against Divorce, . 
Baneful Effects of Divorce, 
Evils and Proposed Remedies, 
A Flagrant Instance, 
Room for Improvement, . 



75 
76 

77 
78 

79 
80 
81 
84 
86 



RELIGION IN NEW ENGLAND. 



Hell an Obsolete Terror, 
The Clergy and Politics, 
How Pulpits are Filled, 
Moulders of Education, 
Church Association, . 
Influence of the Church, 
Hypocrites and Iconoclasts, 



89 
90 

91 
92 

93 
94 
95 



Vlll 



Contents. 



SPIRITUALISM. 



Pretended Mediums, . 
Advanced Spiritualists, 
Origin of Spiritualism, 
Yearning for the Unseen, . 
Skepticism and Spiritualism, 



97 
99 

I GO 
lOI 
1 02 




A Reply to Mr. Mallock; 



Communism can hardly be called an American 
question. No sentiment is more deepl}^ im- 
planted in the native American breast than re- 
spect for the rights of property. The leveling 
philosophy of Hegel, and the Utopian dreams of 
Bakunin find but fev^ disciples among the de- 
scendants of the Pilgrims, and it is not difficult 
to account for this healthy state of public opin- 
ion. There can be no doubt here about the title 
of the freeholder to his estate. Here there are 
no abject and subordinate cultivators, with the 
w^rongs of centuries rankling in their hearts, and 
w^ith the ever-present know^ledge that the earn- 
ings of their labor go to support an idle landlord 



* Property and Progress, or a Brief Inquiry into Contemporary Social 
Agitation in England. By W. H. Mallock. New York: G. P. Put- 
nam's Sons. 



2 Comniunisjii N^ot aii American Question. 

in baronial splendor. The man who tills the 
soil owns the soil, and every stone which he ex- 
tracts from the field, every stump which his oxen 
uproot, represents an addition to his personal 
wealth. The idea that he should share his es- 
tate with others seems to him too absurd for ar- 
gument, and the advocate of such a revolution 
he regards as either mildly insane or wittingly 
dishonest. Communism can take no hold upon 
a people whose possessions have been acquired 
and developed by centuries of rugged toil, who 
call no man master, and whose happy mediocrity 
of condition induces contentment and stability, as 
well as a wholesome distrust of novelty. It is 
in this deeply implanted New England rever- 
ence for established institutions that the hope for 
the future of America rests. Before it the pesti- 
lential vapor of socialism, borne across the At- 
lantic from the squirming and steaming masses 
of Europe, disappears like a plague befoi'e a puri- 
fying flame, and, whatever may be the outcome 
of the struggle, in its various forms, now going 
on between the upper and lower orders in the 
mother continent, in the United States the found- 



An Exotic in England. 



ations of society are likely to remain firm and 
unsapped. 

The subject of Mr. Mallock's work may there- 
fore be regarded as strictly foreign. In conti- 
nental Europe, communism is a reality, formid- 
able to the aged Emperor of Germany, notwith- 
standing his chancellor and his armies ; terrible 
in the form of Nihilism to the Czar of Russia, 
not safe from its machinations in the palace or 
on the public street, and, it may be said, holding 
his life and his crown by the forbearance of the 
conspirators who deprived his father of both. In 
England, communism is an exotic ; but, accord- 
ing to Mr. Mallock, it is taking root, and Mr. 
George's work, on Progress and Poverty., is 
becoming the social gospel of multitudes of the 
working classes. Mr. Mallock attempts to re- 
fute the theories of Mr. George with cold, analyt- 
ical reasoning, and he refines to absurdity, in 
the crucible of accomplished criticism, the broad 
and brilliant assertions of the socialistic aposde. 
But, unfortunately for the effect of Mr. Mallock's 
well-rounded and euphonious periods, the fact 
that Mr. George's arguments may be ill-founded 



Weakness of Mr. Matlock's Case. 



and untenable does not establish a sound defence 
for his clients, the property -holding nobility and 
gentry of England. When he quotes,to prove what 
he calls the grotesque character of the socialistic 
doctrine of the inalienable right of the people to 
the land, the case of the island of Rum, whose 
three hundred inhabitants — all but twelve — 
were expelled in order that the island might be 
turned into a deer forest for an Englishman, to 
prove that, if the expulsion had never taken 
place, the inhabitants would have multiplied, in 
the course of 3'ears, to such an extent that the 
surplus would have had to emigrate, and that, 
therefore, the right to their native shore could 
not have been inalienable, he brings the more 
vividly to mind the atrocious manner in which 
British land-owners have in the past abused the 
right of property, which, largely in consequence 
of such abuse, is now questioned and assailed. 
" Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just," 
says England's greatest poet, and the weakness of 
Mr. Mallock's plea is not in its ingenuity or 
ability so much as in the iniquity of the English 
tenure of land, and of the methods by which a 



Weakness of Mr. Mallock's Case. 



very large proportion of the land was acquired 
by the ancestors of the proprietors, and in the 
game laws which still debar the English work- 
ingman from the invigorating sport of the chase 
in the forest which adjoins his village, and from 
adding to his larder a rabbit or a hare, under 
penalty of arrest as a criminal ; and, on the other 
hand, the influence of the teachings of Mr. 
George and of Mr. Hyndman on the lower 
classes of the Enghsh people, is not because the 
latter have not the intelligence and discernment 
to appreciate the fallacy of the theories pro- 
pounded, but because they keenly feel the injus- 
tice of the existing system, and are ready to ac- 
cept the panacea of the quack, when they cannot 
obtain the prescription of a regular doctor. 
When an advocate deliberately waives, as Mr. 
Mallock does, the issues of fact and of equity, 
and bases his argument on abstract reasoning, 
he may convince the head, but he cannot the 
heart, of the judicial tribunal of the world's 
opinion, and in the mighty impulses which 
cruide the destiny of nations, the heart is above 
the head. 



Labor a7id Capital. 



Mr. Mallock shows wisdom in recognizing the 
strength of the enemy, because, as he states, 
*' since action in modern poHtics so largely de- 
pends on the people, the mildest errors are grave, 
if they are only sufficiently popular. For prac- 
tical purposes no proposals are ridiculous unless 
they are ridiculous to the mass of those who act 
upon them ; in any question in which the people 
are powerful, no fallacy is refuted, if the people 
still believe in it," and Mr. Mallock admits the 
widespread and spreading popularity of Mr. 
George's proposal for the confiscation of landed 
estates. He first takes up Mr. George's proposi- 
tion that *' the laboring class creates its own wages 
as it receives them ; it being wholly false that 
wages are drawn from capital." This proposi- 
tion hardly needs the elaborate and finical refu- 
tation which Mr. Mallock devotes to it. It is 
evident that in New England, for instance, the 
capital of the manufacturer is invested in his fac- 
tory of cotton or wool, the machinery which it 
contains, and the material with which to begin 
manufacture. The skill and labor of the oper- 
atives convert that material into an article for 



Labor and Capital. 7 



sale, and the money received for it comes back 
to pay the wages of the operatives, the other 
running expenses, and, if anything is left over, 
the profits of the manufactm-er on his invested 
capital. It is not, therefore, wholly false, as 
Mr. George asserts, that wages are drawn from 
capital ; for, while the laboring class by its 
own labor creates its own wages as it receives 
them, it does so with the aid of capital, in the 
form of the tools with which the wage-produc- 
ing material is manufactured. It is true that 
the village blacksmith, making his own horse- 
shoes with iron bought with his own money, 
and receiving into his hands the price of his 
labor, creates his own earnings as he receives 
them, and to him Mr. George's proposition would 
correctly apply ; but it would not apply to the 
great multitude of workers, employed in aggre- 
gated masses in the manufacturing establish- 
ments of New and Old England. Labor is the 
vitalizing principle ; without it, capital would be 
inert and non-productive : but without capital, 
also, the labor and skill of the vast majority of 
men and women who depend for their bread and 



Popiytlatioji arzd Subsistence. 



clothing on wages to be earned, would be equally 
non-productive . 

The next proposition, that "population does 
not increase faster than do the means of subsist- 
ence, and thus the current explanations of pov- 
erty are no explanations at all," is the more 
plausible because it is partly true. It is true 
that a few colonists starting in a new^ country 
would not be able to produce the same propor- 
tion of the necessaries of life for their subsist- 
ence that their more numerous descendants, 
with increased facilities and diversity of industry 
and of commerce, would be able to obtain and 
enjoy. The history of all colonial enterprises 
goes to prove this. It is also true, as Mr. George 
avers, that " while all through the vegetable and 
animal kingdoms the limit of subsistence is inde- 
pendent of the thing subsisted, with man the 
limit of subsistence is, within the final limits of 
earth, air, water, and sunshine, dependent upon 
man himself," but it is not true that as men mul- 
tiply they widen, -pari fassii^ the limits of their 
subsistence, and will continue to do so until 
every mile of the earth is peopled. Mr. Mallock 



]\Iotives for Emigration. 



points out that it by no means follows, because 
the limits of subsistence are elastic, that very 
great pressure may not be required to stretch 
them ; but he fails to point out the also evident 
fact that with the majority of mankind, as in 
India and China, the tendency of the people is 
not to press beyond the bounds within which 
comfortable subsistence has ceased to be possible, 
but to remain and grovel upon the soil which 
hardly yields them a daily morsel, and where 
frequent famines, claiming victims by the thou- 
sands, and sometimes by millions, attest the inad- 
equacy of nature to provide for the wants of the 
children of earth. Where population has sprea^, 
it has ordinarily been attributable to other causes 
than a seeking for mere subsistence. The pil- 
grim could have lived in England, the Huguenot 
in France, the Spaniard and Portuguese in their 
native peninsula, had their remaining been only 
a question of food, but religious belief compelled 
the former, as a thirst for riches impelled the 
latter, to seek in strange lands that which they 
could not enjoy at home. Indeed, the history of 
civilization nowhere contains a record of the ex- 



lo Motives for Emigration. 

pulsion or emigration of any large body of peo- 
ple on account of inability to obtain enough to 
eat in the countr}" of their origin, while among 
the barbarous tribes in the period of the Roman 
republic and empire, before capital and private 
proprietorship of land were known to the ances- 
tors of English-speaking races, such emigrations 
were frequent, and sometimes resulted in the 
destruction of the emigrants by the inhabitants 
of the more fortunate countries invaded by the 
savage communists, and sometimes in victory for 
the invaders, whereupon the communists from 
the forests soon developed into landed proprie- 
tors, as jealous of their rights and privileges as 
the people whom they had conquered. 

Mr. Mallock, in endeavoring to show the fal- 
lacious character of Mr. George's implied asser- 
tion that want cannot be caused by the pressure 
of population, appears to err as much on one 
side as Mr. George on the other. He says : 

** Of all other countries, England and America 
are, perhaps, the two which are now most 
closel}^ connected ; but the connection was not 
established without infinite pain and effort, and 



The Ejiglish Food Supply. 1 1 

it costs constant effort every day to maintain it. 
All we need here speak of is the question of the 
American food supply. This reaches England 
only through the most complex and delicate 
machinery, which was slow in construction, 
which is easy to derange, which it is possible 
to ruin, and which it is difficult to add to. Eng- 
land only gets from America because it gives to 
America, and what it gets depends, not on what 
America grows, but on what Americans desire 
of the things that England makes. Thus, so 
far as Englishmen subsist on the produce of 
American corn-fields, it is not the extent of the 
corn-fields that forms the limit of this existence, 
but the wants and the tastes of the Americans, 
as related to England's powers of supplj^ing 
them. Now, such wants and tastes are of all 
things the most liable to vary. There may be a 
point beyond which they cannot shrink, as there 
is certainly a point beyond which they cannot 
expand ; but though they may never entirely 
disappear, yet any day they might dwindle, and 
did they dwindle, what w^ould happen is obvious. 
The limits of subsistence for England would be 



1 2 Property and Poverty. 

suddenly narrowed, and the population of Eng- 
land would at once be pressing against them." 

All of which may be agreed to, with the quali- 
fication that, but for the reservation of large 
tracts of land from cultivation and from cattle- 
raising in northern as well as southern Britain, 
and but for the laws which prevent the soil from 
being cut up, as in France, into numerous small 
proprietorships, the population of the British Isles 
would be, if not independent as to food supply, 
at least very near to independence, and would 
not be in peril of " pressing against the limits of 
subsistence " upon every mutation of taste or 
tariff in America. 

And this brings us to the most important of 
Mr. George's propositions, and Mr. Mallock's 
form of refuting it — that private property in 
land causes poverty, and that therefore the land 
should be confiscated for the public benefit by 
taxation that would leave to the nominal proprie- 
tor only a sufficient amount to compensate him 
as an agent of the state, in the collection 
of rents for the state. As I have indicated in 
my introductory remarks, it is difficult for an 



Property and Poverty. 13 

American to appreciate the force with which this 
proposition presents itself to the minds of the 
Enghsh working classes, for the reason that the 
conditions here and there are so ditierent. Here 
ownership is almost uniformly coupled with occu- 
pation, and, in the rural districts, with cultiva- 
tion ; there it is not. The owner receives and 
enjoys, and expends but little in proportion in the 
locality from whence he drawls his income. Ab- 
sentee landlordism is not confined to Ireland, and 
not infrequently an English squire has owed his 
defeat for Parliament to his neglect of the local 
tradesmen. The sweeping evictions in Scotland, 
immortalized in the pathetic strains of " Locha- 
ber no more," have left a brand upon the popu- 
lar memory that ages will not efface, while the 
existence of almost impassable barriers between 
title and wealth on the one side, and respectable 
labor on the other, causes an irritation which is 
growing more inflammatory with years. Not 
that the English workingman is disloyal to his 
country or his sovereign, but he can see no rea- 
son why the space between the throne and the 
people should be fllled with an aristocracy? 



14 The State as Landlord, 

with coronets and titles, and vested privileges, 
and extensive landed possessions, instead of, as 
in America, the higher positions in life being oc- 
cupied by men who have earned their promotion 
by their toil, by their energy and by their excep- 
tional ability. It is not strange, therefore, that 
Mr. George's assaults upon property, which 
seem to us here so absurd as to be unworthy of 
refutation, are regarded as dangerous by one of 
the most accomplished of critics, and that the 
valuable pages of the ^tarterly Review are de- 
voted to his reply. Mr. Mallock demonstrates 
very clearly that Mr. George's scheme to make 
the landlords middlemen for the state, by taxing 
them up to, or nearly up to, the rentable value 
of their estates, would not benefit the general 
public, for the state would simply take the place 
of the landlord, and, it may be added, would 
probably be more severe in the collection of 
rents, for it is admitted in a quotation by Mr. 
George himself from Miss C. G. O'Brien's article 
on "The Irish Land Qiiestion'' in the nine- 
teenth Century^ that " an aristocracy, such as 
that of Ireland, has its virtues as well as its 



The State as Landlord. 15 

vices, and is influenced by sentiments which do 
not enter into mere business transactions — sen- 
timents which must often modify and soften 
the calculations of cold self-interest." The 
same may be said of the English aristocracy, 
and while there may be instances of harshness 
and oppression, the tenant of the English land- 
owner is doubtless more pleasantly situated than 
he would be as tenant of the soulless and inexor- 
able state. Besides, it is impossible to see how 
the poor would be helped by such a change of 
tenure ; for, as Mr. George proposes that the 
property should be let to the highest bidder, the 
man without a shilling, or a. hundred shillings, 
would be as much shut out from competition as 
he is to-day. 



II. 

From Abstract Reasoning to Facts, 



When Mr. Mallock leaves the domain of ab- 
stract and speculative reasoning in his confuta- 
tion of Mr. George to try issues of fact with Mr. 
Hyndman, he appears at once at a serious disad- 
vantage, for it is manifest that he is either igno- 
rant of the subject with which he is dealing, or 
presumes ignorance in his readers, and delib- 
erately endeavors to deceive them. Mr. Mallock 
quotes from the New Domesday Book to prove 
that the agricultural soil of Great Britain is not 
practically owned by 30,000 persons, as Mr. 
Hyndman asserts, and to show that " the classes 
of smaller land-owners are not far off from a mil- 
lion." We will give his own words and figures : 
''The landed aristocracy, all told," he says, 
" number about five thousand. Just below them 
come 4,800 owners with estates that average 



The Owners of the Land. 17 

700 acres; then come 32,000, with estates that 
average 300 acres; then come 32,000, with es- 
tates that average 200 acres; then 25,000, with 
estates that average seventy acres ; and then 
72,000 with estates that average forty acres, the 
total number of the smaller rural proprietors 
being thus not less than 133,000. Finally, there 
come the urban and suburban proprietors — the 
latter with their four acres, the former with their 
fourth of an acre — and the number of these is 
820,000." Now, in this list of proprietors no 
distinction is drawn between copy-holders and 
free-holders, or between these and lease-holders, 
and any one acquainted with the conditions on 
which English urban and suburban property is 
usually held, cannot doubt that the large major- 
ity of possessors are not free-holders, or owners 
in the real sense, but lease-holders, the fee re- 
maining in the landlord. Again, it has been 
demonstrated that the New Domesday Book is 
untrustworthy in other important statements. 
An extent of 2,781,063 acres, a very large pro- 
portion belonging, it is reasonably certain, to 
great land-owners, is not included in its tables. 



i8 The Owners of the Lajid. 

while the whole metropolis, with its enormous 
rentals and vast estates, is also excluded. 
Again, church lands are entered as the property 
of individuals in occupancy, and the names of 
large land-owners are multiplied according to the 
counties in which they happen to own property, 
the 525 members of the peerage standing, ac- 
cording to Mr. Arthur Arnold, for upwards of 
1,500 owners. Making due allowance for these 
errors, the Hon. George C. Brodrick, in his 
work on English Land and English Land- 
lords^ estimates that "not more than 4,000 
persons, and probably considerably less than 
4,000 persons, owning estates of 1,000 acres and 
upwards, possess in the aggregate an extent of 
nearly 19,000,000 acres, or about four-sevenths 
of the whole area included in the Domesday 
Book returns. If we now subtract the owners of 
between 1,000 and 2,000 acres, who ostensibly 
number 2,719, and must really number as much 
as 1,750, we find that a landed aristocracy 
consisting of about 2,250 persons own together 
nearly half the enclosed land in England and 
Wales." 



Interesting Figures. 19 



On turning to the county tables compiled by 
Mr. Brodrick, we find in still more striking form 
the evidence of oligarchical control of the greater 
part of the agricultural soil of England. Begin- 
ning alphabetically, we learn that in Bedford, 
three peers own 53,789 acres, and fourteen great 
land-owners own 60,127 acres, while 1825 
small proprietors own but 38,906 acres, and 5,302 
cottagers (most of them probably lease-holders) 
possess 824 acres. It will be seen that the three 
peers own about 14,000 acres more than the 7,127 
small proprietors and cottagers. In Derby, six 
peers own nearly double the amount of land 
really or nominally owned by 6,017 small pro- 
prietors and 12,874 cottagers ; and in Dorset, ten 
peers own more than three times the amount of 
land owned by 2,794 small proprietors and 7,694 
cottagers. In the whole of England and Wales, 
400 peers and peeresses own 5,728,979 acres, 
1,288 great land-owners, 8,497,699 acres, and 
217,049 small proprietors own 3,931,806 acres, 
and 703,289 cottagers, 151,148 acres. These 
are dry figures, but they are from an author who 
compiled them with equal industry, care, and in- 



20 Interesting Figures. 

telligence, both from government statistics and 
from information collected by direct inquiry 
among the land-owners themselves ; an author 
who cannot be called a " smatterer," as Mr. 
Mallock terms Hyndman and Marx, but who has 
gone to the very root of the subject, and who, so 
far from being inclined to communism, speaks 
and evidently feels a conservative interest in the 
maintenance of British institutions, as far as may 
be consistent with the welfare and continued 
prosperity of the people of Great Britain ; and, 
in view of these figures, and of facts and cir- 
cumwStances which must be apparent to every 
Englishman with his eyes wide open to his sur- 
roundings, it may not be offensive to say that 
Mr. Mallock sinks to the level of " a smatterer," 
when he quotes the Domesday Book as authority 
that the major part of the soil of England is not 
controlled by a few thousand aristocratic families, 
to whom the toil and enterprise of nearly thirty 
millions of people, directly or indirectly, pays a 
vast and accumulating tribute. 

So far we have been dealing with Mr. Hynd- 
man's loose and essentially truthful averment in 



Aristocratic Incomes. 21 

regard to the number of land-owners, and Mr. 
Mallock's seemingly well-grounded but really 
illusive refutation of it. Now, let us take up Mr. 
Mallock's next assertion, that the aristocracy re- 
ceive not so much as one-third of the gross 
rental of England, which he states to be about 
£99,000,000. In order to arrive at this conclu- 
sion he conveniently cuts off from the aristocratic 
classes all whose estates average less than one 
thousand acres, although the prefix of " rever- 
end" to the names of many of these shows that 
a large proportion of the class are clergymen, 
most of them presumably of the Established 
Church, and undoubtedly connected by blood, 
position, and education with the aristocracy, 
while many others are the wealthy owners of val- 
uable tracts, covered with buildings, in towns and 
cities. These latter may not be reckoned among 
large land-owners, in the extent of their territo- 
ries, but if of gentle descent, they may fairly 
claim to belong to the aristocracy. Mr. Mallock's 
arbitrary bound would also exclude not a few who 
are prominent in the highest circles of society, 
while scores of the country squires, the typical 



22 Advantages of La7id- Ownership. 

landed gentry of England, would hardly more 
than be within the limit, for the average in many 
of the English counties is but little over one 
thousand acres to a squire ; in Anglesea, for in- 
stance, six squires having 10,200 acres, in Mid- 
dlesex five squires having 8,500 acres, and in 
York, W. R., one hundred and one squires hav- 
ing 171,700 acres. 

It should be added that there are very impor- 
tant and desirable advantages connected with the 
ownership of land, besides the pecuniary. The 
squire of the village is a prince in his domain, 
and the coronet of the land-owning peer is far 
from being an emblem of obsolete sovereignty. 
Feudal services, it is true, have for centuries 
been abolished ; but the whole administration of 
a country parish, reformed and liberalized as it 
may seem to be, is within the control of the 
usually pleasant, good-natured and fairly well- 
educated gentleman who owns the soil, who sits 
as a magistrate to try local offenders, as the lord 
of the manor did of old, and whose tenantry cast 
their votes at his beck, as they formerly drew the 
sword at that of his ancestor. Even in the towns 



Advantages of Land- Ownership. 23 



which are centres of skillful industry, and where 
hundreds or thousands of intelligent mechanics 
are able to partially counterbalance the influence 
of the rural proprietors, the land-owners manage 
to maintain, in a paramount degree, their inher- 
ited superiority ; for, in the majority of such bor- 
oughs the issue, as to political representation, be- 
comes one between the squire who calls himself 
a Conservative, and is called a Tory, and the 
equally aristocratic squire, in an opposite parish, 
who calls himself a Liberal, and is nothing but 
a Whig. The Liberal leaders hold forth the 
Whig squire as the champion of popular rights, 
and as there is no choice except between him and 
the avowed Tory, the workingmen give the for- 
mer their support. And yet the English working 
classes feel an instinctive antipathy toward the 
whole landed gentry, while this feeling is recip- 
rocated by the gentry, and finds expression not 
in open utterance, but indirectly ; for instance, in 
the greater severity with which petty oflTenders of 
the artisan class are treated by the esquire mag- 
istracy, as compared with the patriarchal leniency 
extended toward the agricultural tenant or laborer. 



24 The Throne and the People. 

This antipathy is doubtless at the bottom of the 
occasional agitation in some of the lesser towns, 
where there is a numerous population of me- 
chanics, in favor of a paid local magistracy, in 
place of the bench of squires. 

To return to Mr. Mallock's work : That gen- 
tleman, after his endeavor to convince us that 
England is not owned by the class who exercise 
the right of landlords over most that is worth 
owning, goes on to defend the institution of mon- 
archy against the charge of extravagant cost. 
The British throne does not need the champion- 
ship of Mr. Mallock. Among the mass of the 
people of Great Britain who earn their living with 
their sinews and their brains, there is as deep 
loyalty toward the monarchy as among the aris- 
tocracy of title and privilege, and a loyalty all 
the purer and more valuable because it is unsel- 
fish. The throne existed before the aristocracy ; 
in centuries past, as in the present century, in 
the passage of the reform bill, it has made com- 
mon cause with the people against the aristoc- 
racy, and it can and will survive the abolition of 
the special privileges which, in ages gone by. 



Comparison of Incomes. 25 



have been grossly abused, and which have be- 
come so odious to the sentiments of the miUions, 
and so grotesque a mockery of the common 
rights of mankind that, in some particulars, they 
dare not be maintained otherwise than in name. 
Mr. Mallock estimates the cost of the crown to 
be about seven millions of dollars annually, cer- 
tainly not a large amount for the support of what 
he truly denotes " the most splendid and revered 
monarchy of which the world can boast," and, 
he might have added, only about one-fortieth the 
amount which the land-owning aristocracy col- 
lects from the toilers and producers of England, 
without giving back anything in return, or per- 
forming any function save that of luxurious 
existence. 

It seems unnecessary to follow Mr. Mallock 
in his evidence that there are men in mercantile 
life in England who have incomes as large as 
those of the leading land-owners, there being 
sixty-six incomes derived from land of over 
£50,000, and seventy-seven from business, and 
of incomes between £10,000 and £50,000, from 
land 800, and from business 910. So far from 



26 The Question at Issue. 

these figures showing, as Mr. Mallock thinks 
they do, the comparative inferiority of the great 
land-owners as factors in the realm, to the un- 
prejudiced observer the only surprise is that the 
proportion in favor of trade and commerce is so 
comparatively small in a country so limited in 
area as England, whose cities are the workshops 
of the world, and whose vessels furrow every 
sea. It appears that with all the commercial and 
manufacturing enterprise of the English people, 
the great land-owners still rival, or nearly rival, 
in point of income, the leading merchants and 
manufacturers, who, for every pound they re- 
ceive, give a bounding impulse to that business 
which is the life-blood of the nation, and which 
furnishes employment for the multitude, whose 
labor and skill are the basis of England's pros- 
perity and glory. 

Mr. Mallock, while pointing out the errors of 
socialistic agitators, says that he does not con- 
tend that the existing land system is perfect, and 
does not deny or admit that, as time goes on, 
many changes may be needed. This, however, 
is the only real question at issue, and without it 



The Question at Issue. 27 



there would be no occasion for the controversy 
which has given Mr. Mallock the pretext for 
writing his book. George, Hyndman, Marx, 
and other advocates of nationalization or division 
of land, may, and doubtless do, err in some of 
their statements of pretended facts, as well as 
in their reasoning. But the existing land system 
cannot stand or fall upon their errors, and if Mr. 
Mallock desired that his writings should influ- 
ence public opinion, he should have attempted 
to prove not only that George and the others 
were wrong, but also that the system they 
assailed was right. To the radical allegation, 
general in its terms, but sustained by ample his- 
torical evidence, that the rapacity of landlords 
has appropriated the common lands which the 
people once possessed, it is no defence to say 
that " if the land were distributed amongst even 
one-half of our existing population, not only 
would no common land be restored, but every 
acre would have to be taken of such common 
land as is left," or that ''were one-half of the 
population allotted land in plats of not more than 
ten acres to a family, all the land in England 



28 Popular Sentiment. 

would be occupied, and half the population 
would be utterly landless still." This does not 
disprove the facts that previous to the eleventh 
century vast tracts of land, afterward appropri- 
ated and disposed of by the sovereign as his own, 
did belong to the people, that the common lands 
which remained were gradually enclosed by the 
nobles and gentry, more especially in the time 
of the Tudors, although in 1549 ^^ people in 
the eastern counties rose in insurrection against 
the wrong, and that this enclosing was not 
always, or perhaps generally, with a view of 
increasing the landlord's rental, but in order that 
parks might be stocked with useless wild ani- 
mals. 

It is safe to say, however, that there is no de- 
sire on the part of the working classes of Eng- 
land to compel the landlords to give up their 
lands, no matter how unjustly the title to the soil 
was originally acquired, and if there is an appar- 
ent sympathy with the impracticable doctrines 
of socialism, it is because Parliament is slow to 
effect a reform in a legitimate way, in accord 
with the tendency of enlightened civilization, by 



Primogeniture and Entail, 29 



the abolition of primogeniture, and of entail, as 
practically secured in ordinary settlements of 
landed property, or in the wills of landed pro- 
prietors, and through which great estates are 
handed down from generation to generation in- 
tact. In the United States, where the right of 
the testator to dispose of his property is retained, 
but the equal rights of children recognized in 
case of intestacy, the results have been satisfac- 
tory alike to individuals and to the community, 
and any suggestion of return to primogeniture 
would not receive a hearing. The practical effect 
has been to prevent the perpetuation of large 
estates, without invading or infringing upon the 
rights of property, and, as law sanctifies custom, 
it would now be regarded as unjust for a parent 
to ignore, without cause, the claim of a child to 
a fair share of the parental property, and wills are 
seldom made in violation of what most people 
believe to be a natural duty ; while in England, 
on the other hand, primogeniture, sanctioned by 
law, is recognized also by custom. The aboli- 
tion of primogeniture in England would not be 
accompanied by hardship, for it would be simply 



30 Comfort and Agitation. 

a declaration by the law-making body that that 
which every man now has the right to do — 
namely, to devise his real property in equal 
shares — shall be done, if he should not choose 
to make a will to the contrary. Dealing with 
family settlements and the law of entail would 
be another and a difficult matter, involving the 
rights of children unborn and various rights and 
interests of persons living, dependent upon ex- 
pectant estates. But the abolition of primogen- 
iture would be a long step toward the leveling 
of the landed aristocracy, and would have a more 
effective influence in silencing the clamor of so- 
cialism, which may yet become menacing, than 
any quantity of subtle and technical argument. 
Other reforms would be adopted in due time, 
with the deliberation and caution characteristic 
of the English race. 

The improved and improving condition of the 
middle and working classes, and the increase of 
the number who have an interest in the soil, af- 
fords no security against agitation. While there 
have been instances of revolt under the pressure of 
desperate circumstances, as of the gladiators and 



Comfoi't a?zd Agitation. 31 

of the Jacquerie, yet great movements in behalf 
of popular rights have usually reached their 
most formidable proportions when the people 
have learned in the leisure of comfort to feel 
their power and to measure their deserts. Wat 
Tyler's insurrection was an uprising of men who 
were free, and who meant to maintain the liber- 
ties whose sweetness they had learned and of 
which the nobility would fain have deprived 
them. The people of England were in the en- 
joyment of greater liberty when Parliament made 
war upon Charles I. than when their fathers 
had quietly submitted to the iron grasp of the 
Tudors, and it was a nation determined to assert 
the rights it possessed that drove the second 
James into exile. England had endured years 
of greater want than those which witnessed the 
fiercest agitation for the unrestricted importation 
of food, and the fires which gave lurid warning 
that the will of the electors must be obeyed by 
the lords in the passage of the reform bill, were 
not kindled by starving men. If the working 
classes are as well-to-do as Mr. Mallock's some- 
what indefinite figures are intended to show, it is 



Comfort a?id Agitation. 



not in consequence of, but in spite of the land 
system and its drones, and the greater the ac- 
cumulations of their industry the more impatient 
they will become of acknowledging as superiors 
and as rulers, men and families who affect to de- 
spise the toilers beneath them, and who, by 
virtue of descent from some male favorite or fe- 
male harlot of a king, enjoy unnatural exemp- 
tion from the more weighty anxieties and bur- 
dens which Divine Providence has allotted to be 
borne by mankind. 



Elements of Society in New England. 



In the Old World meaning of the term there 
are no classes of society in New England ; there 
is no condition of life, however low, from which 
a man may not aspire and rise to the highest 
honors and the most enviable distinction, provided 
that he has the requisite natural endowments, 
favorable opportunities, and the ability and 
foresight to grasp them. It is mere buncombe 
to assert, as some do, that there is anything 
like a ruling or privileged class ; while it 
cannot be pretended that in New England — 
as in New York — citizens of character and 
wealth stand aloof from political strife. Here 
the office of governor is considered the crown 
of a successful business career, and the gov- 
ernor is the chief of society, as well as of the 
administration. His official trust, instead of 
being profitable, entails a generous expendi- 
ture from his private purse, for he is expected to 
maintain the reputation of the state for hospital- 



34 Office Open to All. 

ity, while every plausible charity appeals to his 
open hand. His reward is in being the first citizen 
during his one year or more of executive service, 
and to be called Governor as long as he may 
live. Of course, whatever a man's origin, none 
but the rich could uphold the dignity of the 
office, and therefore no poor man is ever seri- 
ously put forward as a candidate. The members 
of the General Assembly are also men of good 
social position and usually of independent estate 
in their respective localities, except where the 
foreign-born vote is in a majority. The difference 
between the New England system and the Eng- 
lish is that the members of Parliament — even 
of the House of Commons — belong, almost 
without exception, either to the nobility or the 
gentry, and were born to wealth and aristocratic 
station ; here the people's representatives, while 
generally men of property, have, almost without 
exception, toiled their way up to independence 
and influence from straitened and humble be- 
ginnings. 

But while there are no definite class lines in 
New England, there are certain broad bound- 



Native Dislike of the L'ish. 35 



aries, tacitly recognized by all, and apparent to 
a superficial observer. The native Americans, 
descended from the original settlers, and re- 
moved by fortune above the struggle for bread, 
evidently believe themselves to be a superior 
race, and affect to regard with ill-concealed 
aversion the immigrants from abroad, and more 
especially the Irish.* Nor is this strange when 
one considers how wholly different the Irish im- 
migrants are, in religion, prejudices, habits, and 
ideas of morality and respectability from the 
native population. For instance, the native New 
Englander is not, as a rule, unfriendly to old 
England ; the Irishman detests England ; the 



* It is an interesting fact that the early Puritans held even a stronger aver- 
sion toward the Insh than New Englanders of the present day. As early 
as 165^ a committee of the General Court of Massachusetts, charged with 
the consideration of many '* evills growing amongst vs," recommended as 

follows : 

"10. This court considering j/^ crw^/ and malignant spirrit yt have 
ffrom tymetotyme byn manifest in ye Irish Nation, against ye English 
Nation, doe hereby declare thyr phibition of any Irish men, -women or chil- 
dren being brought Into this lurisdiction on the penalty of ffifty pounds 
starling to each Inhabitant yt shall buy of any marchant ship mr or other 
agent any such /son or /sons soe Transported by ym wch fine shall bee by 
the Countrys Marshall on Conviction of sum Magistrate or Court leavied 
and bee to the vse of ye Informer one third and two thirds to ye country. 
This act to be In force six months after publication of this order." 



36 Native Dislike of the Irish. 

natives are nearly all of the Protestant com- 
munion ; the Irish of the Roman Catholic ; the 
Protestant churches exclude from membership 
persons conducting the liquor traffic, which the 
Catholic Church appears to look upon as no hin- 
drance to Christian fellowship ; the Irish oppose 
the public schools, which Americans cherish as 
the block-house of their liberties ; the Irish com- 
monly belong to the Democratic party, while the 
majority of natives adhere to the Republican. 
Besides, comparatively few of the Irish are 
skilled workingmen, and skill and capital are 
prone to look down on sinews and a spade. The 
depth of the antipathy on the part of native 
Americans toward the Irish might seem incred- 
ible to one not in frequent and confidential asso- 
ciation with natives ; it is deep and harsh, 
though, for motives of discretion, it is seldom ex- 
pressed in public. Nevertheless, an Irish- 
American willing to identify himself with Amer- 
icans, their traditions and their interests, and to 
discard the peculiarities which nettle the patriot- 
ism and provoke the antagonism of the native 
population, would not find the accident of birth 
a serious obstacle in the ascending path. 



The English in Neiv England. 37 



Kindred origin and identity of religion are 
manifestly the chief points in favor of the Eng- 
lish immigrant in New England, while another 
and perhaps material circumstance is that Eng- 
lish residents very seldom interfere in politics ; 
many of them, indeed, adhere to their native al- 
legiance, and do not become citizens. Immense 
manufacturing interests and large estates are 
controlled by British subjects who spend much 
of their time abroad. These, of course, when 
in New England, move in society befitting their 
wealth and their reputation. The mass of Eng- 
lish immigrants are mill operatives, and more 
skillful in the higher grades of factory labor 
than any other nationality. They exhibit here 
the virtues and the faults which predominate in 
any English factory town, modified to a greater or 
less extent by their surroundings, and especially 
by the stringent ordinances in relation to the sale 
of intoxicating liquors. In the New England 
view the obnoxious and exotic feature of the 
English workingman's character is the disposi- 
tion to combine in labor unions and strikes. In 
Massachusetts, where the suffrage is liberal, and 



38 English Lab 07' Agitators. 

many of the mill operatives are voters, the leg- 
islature has been induced to enact laws, similar 
to those in force in England, limiting the hours 
of factory labor, and making various provisions 
for the protection of persons engaged in that in- 
dustry ; but in Rhode Island, where the fran- 
chise is restricted, hours of labor are unlimited, 
and there is no labor bureau to excite discontent 
between employer and employe by the compila- 
tion of troublesome facts, and the suggestion of 
hampering reforms. Not only the manufac- 
turers, but nearly all the property-owning class, 
have been inclined to look upon the labor agita- 
tor as a public nuisance, to be suppressed in any 
legitimate manner, and a really able and liberal 
minded governor, of excellent social position, 
and extensively engaged in the manufacturing 
business, who dared to recommend, in an an- 
nual message, factory legislation after the pattern 
adopted by the British Parliament, has never 
since commanded political confidence or sup- 
port. His recommendations were reported to 
a committee which quietly ignored them, the 
newspapers noticed the matter in brief and sar- 



English Labor Agitators. 39 

castic language, and such was the end of it for a 
time. That gentleman was ten years ahead of 
public sentiment. The voice of humanity has 
nearly convinced the judgment of the lawmakers, 
and a ten-hour provision for women and children 
cannot long be delayed. Apart from the prone- 
ness to labor agitation, the English operatives in 
our factories are a most valuable element of the 
community, and New England can never repay 
the debt that she owes to their energy and to their 
skill. Englishmen who arrived within the pres- 
ent century, poor and friendless, became the 
founders of prominent manufacturing houses, and 
their children are counted among the leading 
families. If English manufacturers have found 
a powerful rival in the United States, they owe 
the fact as much to their own countrymen as 
to Americans. Nor has the day for such English- 
men gone by. 

Although New Englanders are fully conscious 
of and appreciate all that Englishmen have done 
for New England's industrial advancement, yet it 
would be idle to pretend that the quills of nativ- 
ism do not stand up, to some extent, against 



4© Native Prejudice Against the English. 

citizens of English, as well as of Irish origin. 
That the prejudice against residents of foreign 
birth includes settlers from England, I have been 
assured by English residents of old and respect- 
able situation, and my individual observation has 
led to the same opinion. The native antipathy 
is more marked in the country towns than in the 
cities and other centres. Among the elders it is 
strong, and is, I think, a rankling remnant of 
the passion aroused by the Revolution and the 
war of 1812. The writer remembers having 
heard of a grim farmer who, when a worthy 
young Englishman visited his daughter with 
matrimonial intentions, enlivened the courtship 
by chasing his would-be son-in-law, to whom 
birth was the only objection, across lots with an 
axe. The young man, not being a Lochinvar, 
did not care to risk his life for his love, much to 
the detriment of the daughter, who subsequently 
eloped with a miserable tramp fortunate enough 
to have first seen the light of the sun on this 
side of the Atlantic. The dislike of English- 
men is, however, dying out with the old folks. 
The rising generation, especiajly the girls, are 



The Scotch in New England. 4^ 



quite willing to receive on equal terms the new- 
comer from Great Britain whose education and 
habits are up to the American standard. 

In fundamentals of character the Scotchman 
— perhaps I ought to say the Lowland Scotch- 
man—is closely akin to the Yankee. His na- 
tive land, like New England, yields but a grudg- 
ing return to rustic toil, and accumulated wealth 
there, as here, is the reward of the shrewdest 
foresight and indefatigable enterprise — the fore- 
sight which saw that a fordable stream might be 
converted into a great commercial highway, the 
tireless energy and public spirit to accomplish 
the gigantic work. The knotty individuality of 
the Scotchman is respected by the native Amer- 
ican, who is fully conscious of his own, while 
the heroic history and the touching melodies of 
the race of Bruce and of Burns are a part of a 
pohte New England education. The successful 
Scotchman, therefore, readily obtains social rec- 
ognition and welcome. 

As forother nationalities, the Germans are not 
yet sufficiently numerous to exercise an appre- 
ciable influence, although a number of promi- 



42 The Germafis. 



nent and respected men in the professions and in 
business are of German origin. The social cus- 
toms of the Germans form an obstacle in the 
way of harmony with the native population. 
The Germans regard Sunday as a day for recre- 
ation and enjoyment, whereas the New England 
idea is that of a day of abstinence, not only from 
labor but also from amusement, and the laws 
which protect the observance of the Sabbath, 
though modified in rigor, are by no means dead 
letters. A century ago it was the stocks ; to-day 
it is fine and imprisonment. In Ohio, Iowa, and 
other Western States settled from New England, 
the Germans have already come into conflict 
with the natives on the Sabbath and the sump- 
tuary issues, and even in liberal New York the 
Puritanical leaven is strong enough to maintain, 
and recently to have added to, the severity with 
which violations of reverence for the consecrated 
day of rest and of worship may be punished. 
In this section, as I have said, Germans are com- 
paratively few, and Puritanism still dominates 
the community, without serious question or oppo- 
sition. 



The Frejich- Canadians. — The Negro. 43 



The French-Canadians are numerous in the 
factory towns, but they are birds of passage, and 
seldom acquire a permanent settlement. Having 
earned a sufficient sum of money, they go back 
to their Canadian homes, to return when neces- 
sity again appeals for replenishment of the 
purse. They have been called, somewhat un- 
justly, the Chinese of the East, because of their 
migratory habits, and because they receive lower 
wages than the more intelligent and skillful 
Enghsh operatives. But the imputation is un- 
just, for the French-Canadians possess useful 
and estimable qualities which would render them 
a desirable acquisition to the permanent popula- 
tion. 

The negro in New England is a waiter and a 
hobby. He never has been, and is not to-day, 
regarded as the social or political equal of the 
white. There are educated and wealthy negroes 
in New England, yet no social club would enter- 
tain for a moment the idea of admitting one of 
them to membership ; while until a very recent 
date, there never has been a negro member 
of any New England legislature. The old and 



44 New Englatid Impressio7is of the Negro. 

aristocratic families have their colored coach- 
men and servants, just as their ancestors had 
their colored slaves, and while they w^ould 
not deny to the man of color the right to vote, 
they would smile at the suggestion that he 
ought to be admitted to their drawing-rooms, 
or be elected to the General Assembly. The 
feeling toward the negro is not a prejudice ; 
it is a settled belief that he is an inferior 
and servile being — a belief quite compati- 
ble apparently with the most uncompromis- 
ing advocacy of the rights of mankind ; for 
the loudest pleaders for the protection of the 
colored man against tissue ballots and shot-guns 
in the South are the first to sneer and affect 
surprise at any request on the part of the blacks 
for substantial recognition in the North. The 
New Englander thoroughly believes in a white 
man's government — for himself; and there is 
ground for suspicion that the strenuous support 
by the political representatives of New England 
of negro domination and anarchy in the South- 
ern States has been inspired rather by a selfish 
desire to see that section of the Union crippled 



LXiscrimination Agai7ist the Colored Race. '45 

by misrule, and thereby prevented from becom- 
ing a rival of New England in industry and in 
national influence, than by any sentimental pur- 
pose to vindicate the equality of a race, the New 
England measure of whose capacity for public 
affairs is indicated by appointments to such 
offices as lamp-lighter and country constable. 

The degree of liberality toward the colored 
man varies in different commonwealths. Rhode 
Island, where slavery lingered longest, is the 
least liberal. But a few years have elapsed 
since the law prohibiting the intermarriage of 
whites and colored persons was repealed, though 
it had long been obsolete on account of the im- 
possibility of proving an alleged offender to be 
white, the only effect of the enactment having 
been to throw doubts upon the legitimacy of the 
offspring of mixed unions. The statute was 
erased, and by a close vote, but the repeal did 
not change public opinion, and some weeks 
later, when a white youth of respectable family 
married a black woman, he was haled before a 
magistrate, and sentenced to the Reform School 
during his minority, while his dusky bride stood 



4^ Discrhninatio7i Against the Colored Race. 

by weeping, less sympathy being extended to 
her than if she had been a cow, mooing for a 
calf taken from her stall to the shambles. Again, 
notwithstanding the Civil Rights Act of the late 
Senator Sumner, a colored lawyer was recently 
excluded from a place of public amusement, 
while it is well known that certain prominent 
hotels are full when a negro applies for accom- 
modation. It is also well known, though per- 
haps hardly pertinent to the subject, that colored 
men are practically excluded from the Masonic 
order, which in New England is very flourish- 
ing, and embraces within its ranks a very 
large share of the respectability, wealth, and 
culture of the community. It is true that colored 
men have Masonic lodges of their own, but no 
official recognition is extended to them, in Rhode 
Island at least. 

An unprejudiced observer cannot avoid the 
impression that the New England estimate of the 
colored population is justified by experience and 
evidence. The tone of morality is lower, as a 
rule, among the blacks than among the whites, 
there is apparent the disposition to laissez faire 



Morality Aifiong the Negroes. 47 



characteristic of races of tropical origin, and the 
occasional attempt to imitate the manners and 
polish of gentlemen seldom rises above a ludic- 
rous mimicry. The pastor of the leading col- 
ored church in Providence v^as deposed for tell- 
ing his flock unpleasant truth about the neglect 
of soap and water, and urging them to aim for 
something higher in this world than to clean 
boots and drive coaches, but his removal has not 
made his admonitions any the less sound or wise. 
The larger number of colored residents cluster 
together in streets which bear an unsavory rep- 
utation. Lewdness is a prevailing vice, and is 
fostered by promiscuous gatherings for dancing, 
which last far into the morning, while petty 
gambling, in the purchase of cheap lottery tick- 
ets, is almost universal. Gross superstitions, 
undoubtedly remnants of the barbarous fetichism 
of Africa, have a strong hold upon many of the 
blacks, and their idea of Christianity is passion- 
ate and sensual. They interpret the Bible liter- 
ally, and to them the golden gates and jasper 
walls of the New Jerusalem are not a figure, but 
a reality of the future paradise which rises be- 



48 An Aristocracy of Workers. 

fore their ecstasied vision. The persons of mixed 
blood are usually more intelligent than the blacks, 
but the latter, being in the majority, keep their 
liirhter brethren in the backojround, and most of 
the important positions, clerical and lay, in relig- 
ious and other societies, are occupied by men of 
unmistakable African origin. 

Such are some of the materials of which New 
England's population is composed — materials 
various in origin and diverse in their ideas, their 
creeds, and their aims, but nevertheless full of 
vital force and energy, and with a less percent- 
age of human weeds and refuse than in any other 
country on the globe. Nearly everybody is at 
work, from the manufacturer worth millions, to 
the tramp who earns his breakfast in the charity 
w^ood-yard. It is disreputable for any one in 
vi<iorous years and health, and even when of 
ample fortune, to be without employment, and 
for this reason rich young men frequently go 
through the form of admission to the bar, or of 
medical graduation, in order that it may 
not be said that they are unoccupied. The 
sons of wealth who iirnore the industrious exam- 



Gold Not Alone a 'Key. 49 



pie of their sires are still too few in proportion 
to the multitude, and held in too general contempt, 
to do more than irritate the social surface. The 
aristocracy of New England is an aristocracy of 
workingmen — workingmen whose possessions 
are valued by the hundreds of thousands and 
millions of dollars, but still men who work. 

But hardly as men toil for money here, gold is 
not alone a key to select associations. A man 
must be something besides rich to be admitted to 
the parlors and the courtesies of old-established 
and eminent families. Money doubtfully or dis- 
honorably — not necessarily dishonestly — ac- 
quired will not aid in achieving recognition 
among men of perhaps not superior wealth, but 
of unsullied antecedents, and the poor but up- 
right member of a respectable house may move 
in a circle closed, as by a Chinese wall, to the 
millionaire who has built his fortune in question- 
able ways. Again, descent from a statesman or 
judge, whose memory is held in reverence, will 
secure for the degenerate scion a degree of tol- 
eration denied to plebeian prodigals, and the lus- 
tre of the ancestor's fame may blind the eyes of 



4 



50 American Exclusiveness. 

an indulgent public to the shortcomings of his 
heir. Even in America it is something — wealth 
aside — to inherit an honorable name. It 
amounts to an introduction and a start. The son 
of a venerated father begins life several rungs up 
from the foot of the ladder — the rungs that it is 
the hardest for the poor and obscure to climb. 
But, to get to the top, he must prove his own 
mettle. 

Foreigners have had occasion to observe the 
exclusiveness of upper American society. The 
reason is plain. In England and in Germany 
the class to which an individual belongs is as ev- 
ident as the color of his hair. Associate with 
whom he may, he is still a nobleman, or a gen- 
tleman, or one of the people. He cannot divest 
himself of his rank in life. He may rise higher ; 
but can hardly sink lower. In America all are 
nominally equal ; social gradations are not 
known to the constitution or to the laws ; and 
the maintenance of dignity, real or assumed, re- 
quires care in the selection of intimates. Besides, 
as far as foreigners are concerned, well-to-do 
American families have been so frequently de- 



A?nerica7i ExclusiveJiess. 51 



ceived by pretentious adventurers, sometimes of 
noble connections, whose aim has been to get 
American heiresses to support them in lordly 
idleness, that duty to those who are nearest and 
dearest exacts caution on the part of the affluent 
in tendering hospitality to strangers. 



The Native Farmer. 



Though the. farming class is overshadowed by 
the manufacturing and commercial interests, it is 
still the conservative leaven of New England's 
social and political life, suspicious of change, 
and jealously attached to established authority 
and order. The native farmers are not without 
pride of ancestry, and their record of lineal de- 
scent from the original settlers is as clear and a 
good deal cleaner and longer than the rolls which 
trace back the foundation of some noble English 
houses to a monarch's capricious lust. Looked at 
from the standpoint of even Burke's Peerage, 250 
years is a long distance in the past. Several of 
the proudest dukes in Great Britain — to say 
nothing of the lesser aristocracy — would have 
to delve in very low strata of society to discover 
who their progenitors were when the fugitive 
kinsman of Cromwell " called this place Provi- 
dence, because of God's merciful Providence ta 



Pride of Aficcstry. 53 

him in his distress," and when Coddington and 
his fellow-emigrants sought rest in the Isle of 
Peace. Yet the followers of Williams and the 
associates of Coddington are still represented by 
living land-owners, and not a few of them can 
say with truth that there has not been a blotted 
•page in their history in the quarter of a thousand 
3^ears. How many of England's nobility can 
say as much? 

I have spoken of the farming class as the con- 
servative leaven of New England political life. 
In several of the New England States the rural 
vote is still predominant, but in all it is gradually 
losing ground, owing to the growth of the cities, 
the removal of restrictions on the suffrage, which 
was originally confined to the free-holders, and 
the partial adjustment of representation to popu- 
lation. On the other hand, the conservative free- 
holding element is being re-enforced by the busi- 
ness men and manufacturers who are acquiring 
property, and who have an incentive to oppose 
upheaval under the name of reform. Many of 
the rich manufacturers are farmers' sons, Dick 
Whittingtons from the country towns, and they 



54 The Farming Injiuence. 

have a fellow-feeling for the neighbors and the 
homes of their boyhood. Indeed, they frequently 
invest a share of their wealth in the purchase of 
the ancestral acres, and convert the gambrel- 
roofed cottage into an elegant summer retreat. 
Therefore, while farmers who live by farming 
have ceased to be privileged and supreme in 
public affairs, joined with the many who have 
become substantial in trade, manufactures, and 
finance, they are able to prevent the multitude 
who have nothing at stake from gaining control 
over the destiny of the commonwealth. 

The most striking features in the character 
of the rural population of New England are in- 
dividuality and self-reliance. These qualities 
have been inherited from ancestors who were 
compelled by circumstances to depend upon 
their own industry for a living, and their own 
vigilance and courage for defence, when the 
treacherous Pequot lurked in swamps and woods, 
and the father attended Sunday worship with a 
weapon by his side. The founders of these 
colonies were men who thought for themselves, 
or thev would not have been exiles for the sake 



Individuality and Self-Reliancc. 55 

of conscience. Their situation made them still 
more indifferent to the opinions and concerns of 
the world from which they were divided, while 
they stood aloof even from each other, except 
when common danger drove them to unite for 
mutual protection. Their offspring grew up 
amid stern and secluded surroundings, and the 
thoughts and habits of the parent became the 
second nature of the child. I have often imag- 
ined that in the firm, wary, and reserved expres- 
sion on the Yankee farmer's face was photo- 
graphed the struggle of his progenitors two cen 
turies ago. This wariness and reserve does not, 
as a rule, amount to churlishness. The Ameri- 
can, like the English cultivator, has felt the 
ameliorating influences of modern civilization, 
and while he retains his strong individuality, his 
intelligence prompts him to benefit by the oppor- 
tunities denied to his forefathers. 

Nevertheless, there are yet some families so 
gnarled and knotty and cornered that they seem 
to be walled in from the nineteenth century, and 
treat society with distrust, if not with hostility. 
They show their independence by receiving 



56 Gnarled and Knotty Families. 

every social approach with freezing repulsion,- 
and deny to their daughters the associations for 
which they are fitted by respectable descent, by 
intellect, and also by education. The occasional 
consequence is that the daughter, yearning for 
some friend of her own age and the other sex, 
forbidden intercourse with young gentlemen 
who would perhaps gladly be her suitors, and 
frowned upon should she show the slightest in- 
clination to encourage their visits, begins to find 
relief in the coarser company of the hired man, 
who may be a mere ignorant immigrant, or the 
cast-oft' son of a decent American household. 
Before she knows what she is about she has, per- 
haps innocently, gone so far that she is in the 
fellow's power, and is led or forced into a mar- 
riage unknown to her parents. A recent tragic 
event which aroused alike the horror and the 
pity of the public, was directly attributable to 
just such a course on the part of the parent, 
while not a few unhappy and degraded homes 
are examples of similar blind and cruel obstinacy. 
Families of this sort are, however, in a small 
and diminishing minority, although some of 



The Farmer's .Dwelling. 



them possess considerable property, which they 
cannot be said to enjoy. 

The dwelhng of the New England farmer is 
usually lacking in those tasteful accessories which 
add such a charm to the cottage homes of Eng- 
land and of France. Beyond the belt of subur- 
ban villas one seldom sees a carefully tended 
flower-garden, or an attractive vine. The yard, 
like the field, is open to the catde, and, if there 
is a plot fenced in, it is devoted, not to roses and 
violets, but to onions or peas. The eff'ect is 
dreary and uninviting, even though the enclosure 
may be clean, and the milk-cans scoured to bril- 
liancy. Again we see in this disregard for the 
iDcautiful the eftect of isolation upon the New 
England character, the result of hard grubbing 
for the bare necessities of existence. The prim- 
itive settlers needed every foot of the land which 
they laboriously subdued, for some productive 
use ; they had neither time nor soil to spare for 
the culture of the beautiful ; and their descend- 
ants have inherited the ancestral disposition to 
utilize everything, and the ancestral want of taste 
for the merely charming in nature. Yet there 



5*^ IJo77ic Life. 

are gratifying exceptions to the general rule, 
and sometimes a housewife may be met who 
takes pride and pleasure in her flower-beds. No 
doubt it was such a wife that the lonesome old 
farmer was speaking of one evening, in a group 
by a roadside tavern, as the writer passed along. 
''My wife loved flowers," he mournfully said, as 
his weary eyes seemed to look back into the 
past, "and I must go and plant some upon her 
grave.'' 

The home life of the farmer has undergone 
essential changes within the past half century — 
changes consequent upon the strides taken in 
manufactures, and upon the development of the 
fertile acres of the West, and of the vegetable 
gardens of the South, and the immeasurably in- 
created facilities for transportation, which place 
the products of the Bermuda plantation and of 
the California grain-fleld in perennial freshness 
and abundance at the New Englander's door. 
The farmer, however narrow and conservative 
in his view of the world beyond his fences, is 
compelled to be cosmopolitan as to his raiment 
and to his larder. Except in a few remote cot- 



Uoiv Fanners Live. 59' 

tages, the spinning wheel for wool and the '* lit- 
tle wheel" for flax have been laid aside among 
the useless relics of a generation gone by ; the 
old-fashioned tailor no longer journeys from" 
house to house, making into suits the cloth, 
raised and spun on the farm, and the traveling 
shoemaker who took each household in turn, 
toiling faithfully until all were shod, is likewise 
a being of the past. The farmer buys his attire 
ready-made at some shop in city or village, the 
flour for bread, the meal for bannocks and the 
maize for the horses and cattle are from western 
granaries — much of his flesh meat, even, is 
from the abattoirs of Chicago and the pork- 
houses of Cincinnati. Sheep-raising, once a 
profitable branch of agricultural industry, has 
been almost wholly abandoned, former pastures 
are covered with brush and trees, and ruined 
hussacs alone tell of the dense flocks which 
were sheltered within their walls. Farming is 
now subsidiary, in the main, to the production of 
milk, for which there is a ready market in more 
or less distant localities, the demand near home 
being usually equal to the supply. If comfort- 



6o A Darker Phase of Country Life. 

ably well oft", the farmer has a piano, and how- 
ever close in his personal expenditures, he does 
not begrudge his children the means for a liberal 
education. He may go about himself in indif- 
ferent, nay, neglected attire ; but his rickety 
wagon or time-stained carryall conveys his 
daughter daily to a school or a high-priced sem- 
inary of learning. 

But there is a phase of country life lower and 
darker than any at which I have hinted. It was 
not two hours' walk from the second city of New 
England that I rapped at the door of a cabin, 
whose bleak clapboards and ragged shingles 
showed scant regard by the occupants for outside 
appearances. The object of my call was to hire 
a wood-chopper, a man of mixed Indian and 
negro blood, who lived in the lonely place, and 
who was said to be an expert with the axe. 
A cheery invitation to step in was the reply 
to my inquiry, and I was soon seated amid 
surroundings seldom seen outside of rural New 
England. The floor was bare but clean ; the fur- 
niture was scant ; two or three chairs, a table 
without a cloth, and a stove of the simplest pat- 



A Darker Phase of Coiintry Life. 6i 

tern. A still young white woman, whose wan 
but not unattractive features wore a patient and 
shrinking expression, as if reconciled to her 
choice of a life-partner, but deprecating the 
visitors silent criticism, busied herself in pre- 
paring the evening meal. Her husband, a lithe, 
stalwart fellow, whose high cheek-bones and 
lank coal-black hair betrayed his aboriginal an- 
cestry, was playing a merry tune on the violin 
to the delight of a rather pretty little girl, with 
large, bright eyes, and ivory teeth, and round, 
russet cheeks ; while a brown baby tumbled and 
laughed and goo-gooed at her pale mother's 
gown. With all her happiness there was visible 
a pensive shade in the face of the little girl, as if 
her childish mind had already begun to brood 
upon the stigma of her birth. But, though poor, 
it seemed to be a pleasant home, and the simple 
wants of the inmates were evidently supplied. 
Here in the forest they lived, secure from the 
Sneers, if ignorant of the graces and luxuries of 
society. The owner of the land and the timber 
did not grudge or miss their fuel ; while the 
father's arm, at seventy-five cents a cord, kept 
the meal-chest from running dry. 



62 Out-of-the- Way Homes. 

The cabin was a type of many to be seen in 
out-of-the-way places in New England, except 
that the wives are not often of pure Caucasian 
parentage. The fathers, like the one described, 
are usually of African and Indian descent, inter- 
marriages between the two races having been 
very frequent. Their forefathers, on the African 
side, at least, were probably slaves, when slavery 
was a cherished local institution, and a bondman 
could not cross a ferry without a pass from his 
master or mistress. Having grown up before 
the public school system had arrived at its pres- 
ent usefulness, these men and women are al- 
most, without exception, densely ignorant, and 
equally superstitious, though it is but just to add 
that their grade of morality is higher on the aver- 
age than that of the low whites who are similarly 
situated, and who supply so many recruits to the 
State Prison and the State House of Correction. 

Willful isolation, the lack of educational ad- 
vantages, and the increasing poverty of the 
farming class, are the formative causes of the 
growth of social fungi in our agricultural towns. 
While the majority of the cultivators of the soil 



Causes of Degi'adation. 63 

keep up with the age, profit by its opportunities, 
and share in its enlightenment, here and there 
famiHes remain stagnant and secluded, earning 
enough for the absolute needs of existence, but 
without energy or ambition to rise above foul 
and groveling associations. Some of them are 
able to scrape a support from their stony acres ; 
but the greater number live as tenants or squat- 
ters, and work out when they are starved to it, 
their wages soon disappearing in drunkenness 
and fines. Their end usually is in the jail, the 
almshouse, or a pauper's grave. These persons 
have undeniably a somewhat demoralizing in- 
fluence on the communities in which they exist, 
for, as laborers — and they are often excellent 
w^orkers — they are brought into contact with 
people of a superior standard. It would proba- 
bly be easier to convert a savage, than to effect 
a reformation in the habits and minds of such 
families, for they are commonly obstinate in 
their ideas, and have the characteristic New 
England measure of their own equality to any- 
body and everybody. Their squalid cabins suit 
them ; they confine themselves to their own busi- 



64 Private Graveyards. 

ness, and wish the rest of the world to do the 
same. And, indeed, the world, as a rule, leaves 
them alone in their ignorance and immorality ; 
only to stand aghast when some awful crime 
casts a lightning flash into the gloomy recesses 
of which we see so little from the traveled high- 
way. 



Private Graveyards. 



An interesting monograph might be written 
on the' private graveyards of Rhode Island. One 
meets them everywhere. Among the shade-trees 
surrounding a house on the busy street, in the or- 
chard behind the farmer's barn, and again in 
the depth of the wood, a few rude, unchiseled 
headstones, nearly hidden by the tangled brush, 
reveal to the explorer the spot where sleep the 
forefathers of the plantation. I came across such 
a burying-ground not long ago. It was far from 
the traveled highway, far from the haunts of liv- 



Private Graveyards. ^<f 

ing men, among trees and grapevines, and blue- 
berry bushes. The depression in the soil indi- 
cated that the perishable remains had long ago 
crumbled to dust, while a large hole bur- 
rowed in the earth showed where a woodchuck 
had made its home among the bones of the forgot- 
ten dead. With reverent hand I cleared the 
leaves from about the primitive monuments, and 
sought for some word or letter that might tell 
who they were that lay beneath the silver birches, 
in the silent New England forest. But the 
stones, erect as when set by sorrowing friends 
perhaps two hundred years ago, bore neither 
trace nor mark. There were graves enough for 
a household, and likely a household was there. 
It may be a father who had fled from Old Eng- 
land to seek in the wilderness a place where he 
might worship God according to the dictates of 
his heart ; a Pilgrim wife and mother, whose 
gentle love had mellowed and softened the 
harshness of frontier life, and sons and daugh- 
ters, cutoff before the growth of commerce had 
tempted the survivors to the town, or the reports 
of new and fertile territories had induced them to 



66 History in Headstones. 

abandon the rugged but not ungrateful paternal 
fields. With gentle step, so not to disturb the sa- 
cred stillness of the scene, I turned from the lonely 
graves, and I thought, as I walked, that these 
simple tombs in the bosom of nature well be- 
fitted those who had dared the dangers of wild 
New England for freedom from the empt}^ forms 
of a mitred religion. 

It seems strange now, when gazing from Pros- 
pect's height, we behold the beautiful parks, with 
monuments of glittering marble among the ever- 
green trees, and the scores of steeples flashing back 
the genial rays of an April sun, to reflect that 
over half a century had passed, after the settle- 
ment, before a spot of land was set apart for a 
public burial ground, that nearly a century 
elapsed before the first steeple rose above the 
*' Towne street," and that more than one hundred 
years passed away before a lettered headstone 
was used to mark the resting-place of the de- 
parted. But, with the accretion of wealth to the 
living, more care was expended upon the dead, 
and enduring slabs of slate, with appropriate en- 
gravings, took the place of the uncouth fragments 



History i7i Headstones. ^"J 



of rock. With added riches the taste for display 
in headstones, as well as in social life, increased, 
and imported marble was occasionally used to 
designate the tombs of the prosperous descend- 
ants of the early and impoverished settlers. Not 
infrequently all three — the unlettered stone of the 
first hundred years, the slate of the latter half of 
the last century, and the polished and costly mar- 
ble now so common in the great public cemeteries 
— may be seen in one small burying-ground, 
bearing mute testimony to the struggles and 
progress of the occupants. 

But the day for private burying has gone by. 
That such is the case is recognized even by the 
oldest inhabitants, who mournfully and reluctantly 
are transferring the remains they cherish to in- 
closures which no vandal plow can invade, and 
are providing for their own interment by the pur- 
chase of lots in the corporate cemeteries. 



Small Families. 



From the twenty-eighth annual report upon 
the registration of births, marriages, and deaths 
in Rhode Island it appears that the number of 
births in 1880 was fifty-five less than in the pre- 
ceding year, and less than in any year, with 
one exception, since 1873. As the population of 
the state has increased from 20,000 to 25,000 
during this time, "there must have been," the 
author of the report remarks, " causes outside of 
natural causes to have so largely diminished the 
ratio of births to population." Another signifi- 
cant feature of the report is that the proportion 
of the second children of the mother, born in 
1880, was not only smaller than in any one of 
the previous five years, but considerably smaller 
than the average of a period of thirteen years. 
When so respectable an authority gives it as a 
grave and deliberate opinion that the decrease of 
child-bearing must be owing to operations in 
conflict with nature, the writer may be justified 



A Delicate Subject. 69 



in calling attention to a subject so serious, not 
only in its present aspect, but in its influence on 
the future of the American people. It is a deli- 
cate subject, one that is usually avoided, and 
discussed only with hesitating admissions and 
bated breath, but all New Englanders feel and 
know what is going on ; they are conscious that, 
for one child of New England blood who is born 
into the ranks of humanity, ten ought to be born. 
They know that prevention of birth, and the de- 
struction of immature infants, are the crying 
evils of the time. It is useless for learned 
physicians to write treatises to show that the 
race of English colonists in America is degen- 
erating, and that the grand-daughters of ma- 
trons who brought forth, and reared, and nursed 
into vigorous manhood and womanhood chil- 
dren half-a-score in number, are physically in- 
capable of following the ancestral example. 
The New Englanders of to-day are as well de- 
veloped in every respect as their progenitors, 
and as well fitted to act the parts of fathers and 
of mothers. The drug clerks, who serve up pre- 
ventive and abortive medicines, know this to be 



yo Social Senti7ne7zt. 

a fact ; so do the doctors who ply the detestable 
traffic, which always ruins and sometimes kills. 

It is manifestly useless to utter any warning 
against a practice which the social sentiment of 
New England does not recognize as a crime, al- 
though the law condemns it as criminal. The 
women, and I may truthfully add, the men of New 
England, wish to avoid the burden of large 
families ; indeed, to have a troop of children 
is regarded as Hibernian and vulgar, and the 
prolific mother, who would have been looked up 
to with reverence in Rome or in Israel, is more 
likely here to receive a side-glance, half of pity, 
half of contempt. 

But while in one aspect the avoidance of a 
numerous family may be a sign of degeneracy 
from the primitive wholesomeness of early New 
England life, yet I am inclined to look upon it 
also as an indication of a more refined intellec- 
tuality and a clearer and more penetrating in- 
sight into the responsibilities of parentage, com- 
bined with a love of that ease which cannot be 
enjoyed in a household full of prattlers. The 
educated New Englander asks himself or herself 



Motives f 07' Prevention. ^i 

what the use is of bringing into the world beings 
liable to all the ills which beset the human kind, 
beings whose authors cannot insure for them 
either a happy or an honorable existence, and 
who may be a cause for ceaseless anxiety on the 
part of their parents. He or she may plausibly 
argue that, even after all the troubles of a care- 
ful training, the offspring may prove ungrateful, 
and fail to smooth the time-scarred brow, which 
had sweated to earn nourishment for their in- 
fancy. Indeed, there is no end to the dark fore- 
bodings of the future, which might throng the 
minds of the thoughtful husband or wife, and 
deter from assuming the highest function of 
divinity — that of creation — unguided by the 
omniscience which makes it impossible for 
divinity to err. 

But, however well-grounded, as far as the in- 
dividual is concerned, may be the selfish motives 
which prompt the avoidance of parental cares, 
the state cannot but be gravely injured by the 
failure of its most valuable class of citizens to mul- 
tiply in their due proportion. The New England 
stock is the arterial blood of the commonwealth. 



72 An Injury to the State. 

and its decay means a general weakening of the 
body politic. Foreign immigration is rushing in 
in tumultuous tide, and the American element 
which ought to receive and assimilate it is lessen- 
ing in volume and diminishing in strength. The 
foreign element, consequently, is gradually but 
surely advancing toward the ascendant, and the 
homestead of the old family goes to the stranger, 
because there is no son to inherit it. The 
foreigners and their children propagate as nature 
directs, and at their present rate of increase, 
compared with the American part of the com- 
munity, New England will, at no distant date, be 
controlled by a majority alien in character and 
largely in origin to the founders of the colonies. 
The writer has no remedy to suggest. On 
the contrary, he is of the opinion that, as the ave- 
nues of life become more thronged, and the strug- 
gle for existence more exhausting and disheart- 
ening, the practice of preventing the birth of 
children will become more and more common. 
Legislation would grapple the problem in vain, for 
law cannot invade the sacred sphere of marital 
relations, or put a stop to habits which society 



N'o Prospect of Reform. 73 

does not consider as a cause for ostracism, or 
even for a frown. Nor is it probable that any 
measure tending to encourage fruitfulness would 
receive popular indorsement, for it would not be 
in accord with the spirit of the age, and it would 
more immediately and certainly benefit the alien 
part of the community. 



Divorce. 



The radical difference in regard to divorce be- 
tween the greater number of American states, on 
the one hand, and European countries on the 
other, is that in Europe divorce is the luxurious 
privilege of the upper orders, and in America it 
is within reach of all. Here divorce is cheap ; 
there it is costly. In every divorce trial in Great 
Britain, which the writer has heard or read about, 
the parties belonged either to the nobility or the 
gentry, or to the wealthy plebeian class. Here 
the lowest and meanest, without a settled habita- 
tion or a name, do not, of course, think it neces- 
sary to ask for a legal validation of a change in 
their domestic condition ; but it is safe to say that 
the great majority of divorces are applied for by 
persons of moderate property, or perhaps very 
poor but of respectable situation or connection. 

It seems hardly worth while to contend against 
the suggestion that a nation, or a people, who 



The Domestic Equality of Woman. 75 

have a liberal divorce system, must be more im- 
moral than a nation whose courts are denied the 
authority to sever the matrimonial tie. For in- 
stance, France, where absolute divorce is un- 
known to the law, is rotten to the heart, if Zola's 
novels are as vivid as they are nauseating, and 
even Frenchmen who shudder at that author's 
delineations of French home-life, seem to confess 
in their shrinking that they recognize the hideous 
reflection. No such picture can be truthfully 
painted of New England social existence. 
We have plenty of licentiousness here, but it 
is known by no other name. The " hon ami^' of 
the faithless wife is at least ashamed of his in- 
famy, and the boundary which divides an avow- 
edly sinful career from decent association is dif- 
ficult to cross. 

The most meritorious feature of the New Eng- 
land divorce system is the acknowledgment of 
the domestic equality of woman, and the aim to 
protect her against the cruelty so prevalent abroad , 
and so common in America also, among the 
class of the population whose religious prejudices 
deter them from seeking relief from marital mis- 



^6 Abuse of the Divorce Laws. 

ery before secular tribunals. The court records 
prove that a large majority of petitions for di- 
vorce are made by wives, while many of the 
causes set forth indicate that the applicants had 
been driven to the step as a final refuge from un- 
endurable bondage. Among three hundred and 
forty-seven applications in Rhode Island, in 1880, 
two hundred and fifteen alleged neglect to provide 
the necessaries of life, seventy-six charged with 
extreme cruelty, seventy-three continued drunk- 
enness, and one hundred and eighty-eight wil- 
ful desertion. These statistics show clearly and 
eloquently why the friends of equal rights for 
women are not among the clamorers for a Scrip- 
tural divorce law. 

It would be insincere to pretend that the liber- 
ality of the divorce laws is not sometimes taken 
advantage of to obtain divorces where none ought 
to be granted, and when the only object of one 
or both of the petitioners is the gratification of 
a desire for a new affinity. Instances of such 
abuse are heard of occasionally, as when a well- 
to-do manufacturer paid his indiff'erent and com- 
plaisant wife ten thousand dollars to institute pro- 



Benefits of Liberal Divoi-ce. 77 



ceedings against him, in order that he might be 
at liberty to marry a pretty mill operative, who 
guarded her virtue jealously. The usual way in 
such cases is for the husband and wife to agree 
upon terms, and the latter to begin the suit, 
which is carried through without opposition, and 
then both parties are free. It is true that the 
statute prohibits such collusion in unequivocal 
language, but it is extremely difficult to prove col- 
lusion, and the public, by tacit consent, consider 
a divorce proceeding a private affair in which 
none but the principals have a right to interfere. 
As a rule, however, the divorce system works 
benignly and beneficently, and in the interest of 
human happiness and harmony. The instances 
of abuse are exceptional, as far as I have been 
able to discern. The large majority of divorced 
persons had long previously been separated, and 
the decree of the court simply made them legally 
single as they were already single in fact. De- 
sertion, an often-recurring cause of divorce, does 
not necessarily or probably imply marital mis- 
conduct on the part either of husband or of wife. 
The vast and ever-developing resources of the 



yS Drunkenness and Divorce. 

country offer limitless opportunities and tempta- 
tions to the Eastern man, slaving along for the 
support of his family, and maybe sinking every 
day deeper in the mire of poverty, to desert duty 
and responsibility, and begin life anew in a dis- 
tant region of the West. Perhaps the fugitive 
may perish in his search for gold, and the aban- 
doned wife never be informed of his death, but if 
she survives the shock of desertion, and has indi- 
vidual hopes and prospects, she is likely to pru- 
dently obtain a legal independence, in order to 
remove all doubt as to her position, and to pre- 
vent the recreant, should he return, from claim- 
ing the rights of a spouse. Drunkenness also is 
prominent among causes of divorce ; not because 
drinking habits are more common in New Eng- 
land than elsewhere (the contrary being the fact) , 
but because, while the English or the Irish wife 
allows a drunken and brutalized partner in matri- 
mony to beat and thrash her at will, contenting 
herself now and then with retaliating in kind, the 
American wife leaves her persistently intoxicated 
and useless husband, procures a divorce, and 
tries for better luck. It should be added that neg- 



Crusade Against Divorce. 79 



lect to provide the necessaries of life is not a 
sufficient cause for the granting of a divorce, un- 
less the husband is proven to be of the ability to 
provide, and that this allegation is generally ap- 
pended to strengthen the charge of desertion or 
of drunkenness. Of the divorced women whom 
the writer has observed, the former husbands of 
the greater number had run away to seek their 
fortunes elsewhere. Had the women in question 
been residents of England they would have re- 
mained widows without the dignity and liberty 
of widowhood. As it is, they were restored to 
maidenly singleness, and not a few of them have 
become wives again, and, to all appearances, 
happy and contented wives. 

Some Christian ministers have engaged in a 
crusade against the re-marriage of persons di- 
vorced for other than Scriptural cause, and have 
given it to be understood that they will not unite 
such persons in wedlock ; that they, officers of 
the State, as far as this particular duty is con- 
cerned, will not be bound by the laws of the State, 
but only by a narrow religious rule laid down by 
themselves. Perhaps this course may seem to 



8o Baneful Effects of Divorce. 

them to be right, but the general public take a 
different view of it. That a woman divorced 
from a cruel or drunken husband, or from one 
who, by long absence and persistent neglect, 
has forfeited all claim to her companionship and 
esteem, should be denied an opportunity to marry 
another, and a worthy man, and to start in life 
again, in the God-intended position of a wife 
and mother, is unreasonable, and no amount of 
argument will convince the calm and unpreju- 
diced mind that compulsory celibacy would be 
for the individual benefit of the divorced person, 
or for the best interest of society. Marriage is 
the natural condition of human beings. It is true 
that individuals differ in temperament, and that 
some are cold and dispassionate, and could re- 
main continent for a lifetime ; but ordinary men 
and women are not so constituted, and the pas- 
sions that are denied a legitimate outlet will find 
a vent in vice. 

It is upon the children of the legally-severed 
parents that divorce has a baneful and chilling 
effect. The offspring are nearly always aban- 
doned by the husband to the care of the wife. 



Baneful Effects of Divorce, 8i 

and their sensitive and receptive minds feel only 
too acutely their mother's loneliness and their 
own. I will never forget a scene I once wit- 
nessed in the Supreme Court of Rhode Island. 
A pale-faced and poorly but neatly clad woman 
walked out of the court-room, after the hearing 
of her petition for divorce, bearing in her arms a 
sleeping baby, and followed by two little girls, 
about four and six years old. The little girls were 
sobbing as if their hearts would burst. Young as 
they were, they knew that the solemn-faced 
judges were about to deprive them of a father — 
a worthless and dissipated father, perhaps, but 
still their father, who in his better days had bought 
candy for their stockings on Christmas eve, and 
dandled them on his knee to a nursery rhyme ; in 
whose strong hand they had fondly rested their 
tiny fingers, proudly thinking of the day when 
their heads would be up to his shoulder. How 
blank the world must have seemed to those chil- 
dren, their mother's frail arm alone between them 
and the hospitality of the poor-house I It is not 
strange that the fresh young spirit, shriveled and 
bruised by the privation of paternal affection and 



82 Evils and Proposed Remedies. 

sustenance, loses its bounding buoyancy and 
grows furtive and morose, and that the subse- 
quent career is poisoned by the cup of bitterness 
drained in the days of childhood. It would be 
well, therefore, that applications for divorce by 
persons who have incurred the responsibilities of 
parentage should not be readily granted, and that 
infants should not be hastily deprived of the 
guardianship which even a father's name some- 
times affords. In this respect the law ought to be 
made more stringent, or the practice of the courts 
more discriminating and conscientious. At pres- 
ent the children are awarded like the chattels, 
and seemingly without any more consideration. 

It may thus be seen that a liberal divorce sys- 
tem works a large amount of good, and not an 
insignificant amount of evil — good in permitting 
the severance of the tie that binds to a living 
corpse, in enabling the deserted wife to start in 
life anew, and in protecting woman against the 
cruelty or tyranny of the wretch who has forgot- 
ten his manhood and his troth ; evil in allowing 
the collusive separation of couples for whose di- 
vorce there is no adequate or justifying cause, and 



Evils and Proposed Remedies. 83 



in thus forwarding and abetting practices which 
in essence are polygamous, in affording oppor- 
tunities for the clandestine obtaining of divorces 
without a fair notice to the defendants, and in 
blighting the lives of the children of parties di- 
vorced by depriving them of the advantages of 
fdial relation. These evils ought to be remedied, 
if possible, but the^remedies proposed and advo- 
cated, chiefly by ministers of religion, are, in 
the general view, worse than the evils them- 
selves. A return to a Scriptural divorce system 
would be contrary to the enlightened and pro- 
gressive spirit of the age. Indeed, in New York, 
where absolute divorce is granted for adultery 
alone, the legislature not long ago modified the 
provision that the guilty defendant in the divorce 
proceeding should not marry again during the 
life-time of the complainant, by providing that 
such defendant might re-marry five years after the 
divorce, upon evidence satisfactory to the court 
that he had behaved well meanwhile, and re- 
cently the highest tribunal in that state has ren- 
dered a decision practically nullifying the restric- 
tion altogether. This indulgence has been re- 



84 ^ Flag 1' ant Instance. 

ceived with satisfaction by the organs of pubhc 
opinion in New York, although the Puritan ele- 
ment is powerful there, and the same legislature 
that relaxed the divorce law increased the pen- 
alty for taking the name of the Saviour in vain. 
The New York Scriptural divorce system, the 
model of that which the clergy would like to see 
established in every New England State, has fos- 
tered and promoted the most scandalous and crim- 
inal practices on the part of private detectives 
and others, hired to commit perjury, and some- 
times to perpetrate physical outrages, in order 
that proof might be obtained to meet the 
requirements of the law ; and the effect of the 
restriction upon re-marriage has been to bring 
up questions as to the legitimacy of children,. 
to unsettle titles to property, and to brand 
with the stigma of bastardy sons and daughters- 
who had never suspected that they had been 
born in other but honest wedlock. I have 
in memory a flagrant instance — that of a dis- 
carded but pensioned and contented wife of forty 
years before who was dragged from her senile 



A Flagrant Instance. §5 



retirement by grasping relatives to be a figure- 
head in contesting the will of her former hus- 
band, who, when parted from her by the court's 
decree, was comparatively poor, but subse- 
quently, with the aid of an energetic second wife, 
the mother of his children, accumulated a very 
valuable estate. The son of the departed, a du- 
tiful and estimable young man, to whose industri- 
ous and intelligent co-operation had been due 
much of his father's success, learned for the first 
time in that court-room that his father had been 
married before the union to his mother, and 
the charge that he was illegitimate seemed to 
strike him to the heart. The suit was so mani- 
festly mercenary and unprincipled that, although 
the first wife had, or appeared to have, a strong 
case in a legal point of view, the Surrogate (as 
the judge of probate is called in New York) 
stamped it out with a decision which did thorough 
justice, however at variance it may have been with 
leather-bound precedent. The experience of 
New York with Scriptural divorce is certainly 
not of a character to tempt New England to 



86 Room fo7' httprovefnent. 



adopt the advice of the pulpit, and the precept 
laid down by the Testament.* 

The room for improvement, in my judgment, 
is not so much in the divorce law itself as in the 
hasty and indiscriminate forms of procedure 
under it — which encourage collusion and ignore 
the claims of helpless and innocent infants. I 
would suggest, as a proper method of restraint 



* To the shameful trade in fraudulent divorces it is hardly pertinent to al- 
lude here. That business flourishes in New York and other Stales, where 
divorces are granted only for " Scriptural cause," and has grown to be a 
crying evil of the day. Depraved and unscrupulous lawyers thrive on the 
procuring of forged and fictitious decrees, alleged to have been issued in 
Utah, and other States and Territories of the Union, where the divorce laws 
are dangerously lax. In Utah, for instance, divorce is granted by the Mor- 
mon probate courts for incompatibility of temper, and it is not even 
requisite that the petitionee be a resident of the territory. The tribunals of 
several States have pronounced these divorces void, when decreed on the 
application of parties who are not actual residents of the Territory in which 
they were decreed, and several individuals have been sentenced to prison as 
bigamists for marrying again, under the impression, real or pretended, that 
the judgment of a Utah court had released them from their previous mat- 
rimonial oblig'itions. 

It is an interesting fact that in South Carolina the divorce question has 
been treated as a political issue. Before the State fell into the hands of the 
negroes through reconstruction, the South Carolina laws did not permit of 
divorce on any ground whatever. The negro legislature enacted a divorce 
law almost as liberal as that of Rhode Island. AVhen the Democratic 
whites again came into power, the conservative press at once called for the 
repeal of the law, and the restoration of the old condition of aflTairs, and the 
law was, I understand, erased from the statute book. 



Room for Ittiprovement. ^7 



upon collusion, and for the prevention of injustice 
to those who cannot plead for themselves, that 
the public prosecutor, or an assistant repre- 
senting that officer, should be present at every 
hearing of a petition for divorce, with the au- 
thority to question witnesses, and, if he should 
deem it proper, to summon parties to testify, m 
order that the Court might be enabled to act 
upon full and trustworthy information. It is 
obvious that the Court must judge by the evi- 
dence before it. As things are now, that evi- 
dence—except in the very rare instances of 
contested divorce suits — is the testimony pre- 
sented by persons anxious to be divorced and 
who may or may not be acting collusively. The 
Court may conceive an impression that a suit is 
collusive, but judges have no right to weigh im- 
pressions against sworn and uncontradicted evi- 
dence. The presence of an officer appearing m 
behalf of the state would aid the Court to obtain 
and to decide upon a satisfactory understanding 
of any doubtful or suspicious case, and would 
probably deter many from bringing suits for 
causes morally if not legally insufficient. 



Religion in New England. 



The change that has taken place in the reli- 
gious thought of New England, within fifty years, 
is strikingly evident in the material surroundings 
of Christian worship, as in the mollified interpre- 
tation of Christian doctrines. The teachings of 
Jesus Christ are still avowedly believed by the 
large majority of the community, but they have 
no longer the gloomy and terrible meaning which 
made the Pilgrim Fathers imagine themselves the 
chosen militia of a vindictive Deity, with a special 
direction to exterminate all who did not agree 
with their narrow view of His revelations. The 
Puritans are still Puritans in name ; but their 
Christianity is of a type adapted to the sensitive 
and enlightened conscience of a humane and civ- 
ilized century. Church organizations are main- 
tained more with the object of carrying on chari- 
table and temperance work, of cultivating the 
social virtues, and of bringing persons — espe- 



Hell an Obsolete Terror. 



89 



dally the young - together in pleasant and ami- 
cable intercourse, than with the idea of motmg 
Christians to sackcloth and ashes by pamtmg 
the horrors of hell, or depicting the joys of heaven. 
I have listened to a number of preachers, some ot 
them among the most distinguished belonging to 
the several evangelical sects, and I have not heard 
one pretend to enunciate literally the dogma of 
eternal punishment. Even the Methodist clergy- 
men, who are much more emotional, as a rule, 
than Bapdsts or Presbyterians, are silent about 
the gnashing of teeth and the lake of brimstone 
and prefer to appeal either to the best sentiment 
of humanity -gratitude -by describing the 
love and the sufterings of the Saviour, or to the 
practical and selfish side, by proving from every- 
day circumstances that to be a Christian is the 
best policy, even as far as living on earth is con- 
cerned The former argument is probably in- 
tended for the women, the latter for the men. 

The clergy are not now the political monitors 
of the community, as when, one hundred years 
ago, the election sermon, preached in Boston, 
and printed in pamphlet form, was spelled by the 



90 The Clergy and Politics. 

light of the pine-knot in the cabin on the Berk- 
shire plantation, inspiring the rustic breast with 
holv zeal to deliver the Israel of the New World 
from the yoke of the English Sennacherib. The 
newspaper has taken the place of the pulpit as a 
political beacon and guide, and, as every de- 
nomination and congregation includes members 
of both the prominent national parties, it would be 
impossible for a clergyman to indulge in even 
a distant partisan allusion without offending some 
one of his hearers. The clergyman is free, like 
any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and 
express his opinions in regard to public affairs, 
but the judicious pastor is not prone to use that 
freedom indiscreetly. 

But, although the preachers are no longer 
political leaders, there is, in the opinion of the 
writer, based upon what he has heard and read 
of the past, and observed of the present, a larger 
proportion of learned, talented, and eloquent 
men among the pastors who minister in the 
meeting-houses of New England to-day, than in 
any generation gone by, before or since the 
abolition of the Standing Order. One obvious 



Hozv Pulpits At'e Filled. 



reason for this is that the clerical ranks no longer 
depend for recruits upon the colleges alone ; 
some of the most brilliant and effective pulpit 
orators are graduates from the mercantile desk 
and the printer's frame, and are acquainted by 
personal experience with the feelings and wants 
of the laymen whom they have felt called upon 
to guide. Again, those of the regularly edu- 
cated clergy, who are alike capable and ambi-^ 
tious, are incited to intellectual effort by the 
knowledge that congregations worth preaching 
to are more fastidious and critical than in earlier 
days, and that eloquence goes further than 
orthodoxy. A preacher who cannot round his 
periods fluently, whose ideas are stale, and who 
neither thrills nor charms ; who cannot, in a 
word, fill the pews, the rent from which supplies 
his salary, had better seek some other occupa- 
tion, if he wishes to succeed in life. It was not 
so in the time, still within the memory of living 
men, when the state could compel a reluctant 
parish to contribute to the support of an obnox- 
ious minister, and when Baptists were impris- 
oned in Massachusetts jails for refusing their 
tithes to the Congregational treasury. 



-92 Mouldws of Education. 

The clergy are still pre-eminently the mould- 
ers of education. The presidents and professors 
of leading universities are usually prominent in 
^ome evangelical sect, and this is probably owing 
to the fact that every seminary of higher know- 
ledge is under the control of a branch of the 
Christian Church, w^hose influence is predomi- 
nant in the faculty, and which regards the col- 
lege as a filial institution, with traditions inter- 
twined with its own. However skeptical or in- 
different students may be to religion, they can- 
not fail to imbibe at least an esteem for the doc- 
trines of the Saviour from the teachers who im- 
part to them secular lessons. The impressions 
thus received by the plastic mind of youth are 
not likely to be ever wholly effaced. The man 
or the divinity we venerate at nineteen we in- 
stinctively bow to at forty. 

The main and perhaps the best feature of 
church association is the opportunity offered for 
social and companionable intercourse. The fes- 
tivals and other gatherings, and the escorts to 
and from them, are of course promotive of mat- 
rimonial engagements, while the religious glam- 



Church Association. 93 

our throws a salutary influence around each 
budding betrothal. In the choir, in the Sunday 
School class, and at the refreshment table, intro- 
ductions are made and friendships formed, which 
frequently result in happy unions, and the au- 
spices are certainly favorable for the future of 
the couples thus attracted to each other. If for 
this alone, the Christian Church would be a 
blessing to modern New England society. 
Church connection also undoubtedly holds to- 
reformation many who, but for the feeling of 
self-respect and responsibility thus engendered, 
and the encouragement which they thus receive 
in adhering to good resolutions, would fall back 
into habits of dissipation or of crime. Any one 
who has witnessed the anxiety of wives, whose 
husbands have been rescued from worthlessness 
and vice, to induce them to go to meeting regu- 
larly, will readily understand the importance of 
this branch of church usefulness. I may add 
that religious attendance serves to soften the 
somewhat harsh individuality of the New Eng- 
land character, by almost compelling families, 
who would otherwise live in Asiatic exclusive- 



94 Tnjiue7ice of the Church. 

ness, and sullen independence, to extend to each 
other at least an appearance of courteous recog- 
nition. 

The beneficial influence of the Church in New 
England can be perhaps most vividly idealized 
by trying to imagine what New England would 
be without the Church — without the Sabbath 
bell and the Sabbath School, without the educa- 
tion of the little ones in the beautiful lessons of 
the Testament, without the bracina of the weak 
by the Sunday sermon and meeting-house inter- 
course, without the softening and neighborly ef- 
fect of church-membership and association. A 
great deal is said about hypocrisy among pro- 
fessing Christians. There is, however, one re- 
deeming thing even in hypocrisy — it is a tribute 
to the virtues whose mask it pretends to assume. 
In a depraved and reckless society hypocrisy 
would be needless, because both real and simu- 
lated virtue would be held in contempt. But it 
is apparent to an unprejudiced observer that the 
number of religious hypocrites is very much ex- 
aggerated. It does not follow that a man is a 
hypocrite because, from a broad and intelligent 



Hypocrites and Iconoclasts. 95 

measure of what he owes to himself and his 
children, he countenances and supports a Chris- 
tian preacher without complying in all his con- 
duct with the rules of Christian fellowship. It is 
not fair to call such a man a hypocrite, as long 
as his course of life is frank and ingenuous. 
Yet there are many thousands of such men in 
New England, and they are the favorite target 
for the scoffer, who iconoclastically delights in 
battering the fabric which he could not replace. 
As for the occasional and notorious revelations 
of guilt under the guise of holiness, it will be 
generally found, on analysis, that the criminals 
are individuals of weak character, who, falling 
into difficulties, had not the manhood to face in- 
nocent poverty, and sought in crime a temporary 
refuge from the storm that would have stripped 
them of all but honor. Exposure followed, as 
an almost inevitable result, and the religion of 
which they had been professors shared, as a 
matter of course, in the obloquy attending their 
downfall. 



Spiritualism. 



The extent of the influence of Spiritualism can- 
not be ascertained by merely counting the mem- 
bership of Spiritualist meetings and associations. 
The avowed Spiritualists — those who confess and 
exhibit their creed and practices to the world — 
are but a small minority of the multitude who are 
more or less believers in the genuineness of os- 
tensible spiritualistic phenomena. Numerous 
prominent and active members of Christian 
churches are frequent and credulous at the sit- 
tings of so-called mediums, and among the dis- 
ciples of the latter are numbered not a few men' 
and women of large wealth, of unimpeachable 
standing, and sometimes also of estimable liter- 
ary acquirements. Indeed, Spiritualism finds 
but few disciples among the ignorant and the 
poor. The mass of the ignorant, especially of 
foreign birth and parentage, are religiously su- 
perstitious, and regard spiritualistic manifesta- 



Pretended Mediums. 97 



tions as partly diabolical and pardy fraudulent, 
while money is the " open sesame" to the me- 
dium's dark room, a circumstance which shuts 
the door to him who has not money to spare. 
Most of the Spiritualists are, therefore, native 
Americans, and persons of sufficient means and 
leisure for exploration in that domain, which to the 
skeptic is alike impalpable and invisible. 

The pretended mediums are, almost without 
exception, women, unlearned, of some personal 
attractions, and adepts at sleight of hand. With 
the majority of them Spiritualism is a mere 
shield for prostitution. Others again are decor- 
ous in their private behavior, as far as the public 
are aware. Nearly every medium who holds 
sittings has a husband or male friend, who acts 
as agent and scene-shifter, and is presumed to 
overawe the incredulous. Dead Indians appear 
to have a monopoly of communication between 
the spirit-world and New England mortals ; at 
least the modern witches of Spiritualism nearly 
all aver that their familiar sprites are the disem- 
bodied souls of sachems who lived in the long ago, 
and who appear to have made very slight progress 

7 



9^ Pretended Mediums. 

in the English language, since their transportation 
to the happy hunting-grounds. An Indian spirit 
is a very convenient oracle, for a shadowy aborigi- 
nal whose identity cannot be fixed, is secure 
from cross-examination as to his antecedents and 
his contemporaries, while the natural voice of the 
medium can easily be disguised in the gibberish 
supposed to be uttered by the celestialized red 
man. The ghostly revelations are nearly all of an 
abstract and indefinite character, but occasionally 
facts are mentioned, with startling definiteness. 
Every instance of the latter sort, is of course re- 
lated far and wide, with addition and exaggera- 
tion, and more converts are drawn over to the ranks 
of Spiritualism. But, notwithstanding these oc- 
casional oracular successes, every medium who 
has specially attracted public attention has been 
proved to be a cheat and a trickster by evidence 
sufficient to convict of crime in a court of justice, 
before an intelligent jury. Nevertheless, even 
after exposure, they go on with their exhibitions, 
are patronized as numerously as ever before, 
and are condoled with by their fellows as mar- 
tyrs to the cause. 



Advanced Spiritualists. 99 



Advanced Spiritualists, apart from their faith 
in SpirituaHsm, are commonly advanced, or rather 
lax, in their social and political ideas. Free- 
love, the assassination of rulers, and the unhm- 
ited issue of stamped paper as coin, are among 
the tenets cherished, and frequently promulgated 
to the world by Spiritualists of the progressive 
type ; while even the milder believers in heav- 
enly inspiration of the nineteenth century Pyth- 
onesses stand politically and socially on the ex- 
treme edge of radicalism. The conservative por- 
tion of the community is almost as a body op- 
posed to SpirituaHsm, and incredulous in regard 
to its professed manifestations. The pulpit and the 
bench are virtually of one mind in condemning it, 
the former as irreligious, and the latter as irra- 
tional, and the Chief Justice of Rhode Island went 
so far, in a recent prominent will case, as to sub- 
stantially express the opinion to a jury that implicit 
faith in Spiritualism was an insane delusion. 
This view, strong as it was, appeared to meet 
with general indorsement, although denounced by 
Spiritualists as unjust and unsusceptible of proof. 
But even Spiritualists would probably prefer to 



lOO Origin of Spiritualism. 

have their mundane controversies decided by a 
judiciary not in the habit of resorting to mediums 
for enlightenment. In New York a judge of the 
highest tribunal, eminent for his learning and ex- 
perience, became so enwrapped in Spiritualism, 
that he avowed that his decisions were inspired 
by communications from the unseen, and public 
sentiment compelled him to resign. I have not 
heard of any similar instance in New England. 
But, while I have yet to see or to hear of any- 
thing but chicane and muddled platitudes in spir- 
itualistic exhibitions and revelations, in my opin- 
ion Spiritualism may have a future before it of 
tremendous import to the human race. Spiritual- 
ism is the offspring of religion and of skepticism 
— of skeptical religion and of infidel yearnings. 
While religion was itself spiritualistic, while the 
angels and the demons, and the disembodied 
souls were to the Christian believer beings as real 
as the men and women of flesh and blood 
around him, there was no place for modern 
Spiritualism. But nineteenth century Chris- 
tianity, in discarding the personal and ever-pres- 
ent and ever-felt realism of another existence. 



Teaming for the Unseen. loi 



in substituting for the good and bad beings who 
hovered over the rude couch of the early Puri- 
tan, and the pallet of the Roman monk, who, 
alike to Mather and Loyola, were creatures as 
distinct as themselves, a supernatural entity too 
misty and incomprehensible to be perceived by 
the mortal mind, or to be the object of human 
emotion, compelled the heart, sighing for conso- 
lation that society could not give — for some in- 
spiration or token from those who had passed 
beyond — to seek a refuge in Spirituahsm. The 
parent whom death has deprived of a darling 
child; the child whom inexorable fate has 
robbed of a cherished father or mother ; the hus- 
band or wife, whose yoke of love has been broken 
by mortality — each longs for some tangible, 
some visible, some audible intercourse with the 
departed, for an assurance, distinct and direct, 
that, while the body moulders, the spirit lives, 
and feels an interest in the affairs and the dear 
ones of earth. This longing is unsatiated by 
the infinite devotion and promises of the Saviour, 
for the venerating and self-abnegating love which 
the pious Christian entertains toward Jesus is es- 



I02 Skepticism and Sfiritualisfn. 

sentially different from the human and instinctive 
chord which binds him to the wife of his bosom 
and the offspring of his loins. The latter cannot 
be gratified or displaced by the former, even after 
the wife or child has ceased to breathe. It is 
this longing which leads the mourner to have re- 
course to the medium, to join the mystic circle, 
first as a hesitating explorer, and later on as a 
credulous and impressionable votary. The mo- 
tive that prompts this blind and trusting confi- 
dence is too sacred to be sneered at, however 
absurd to the cool and practical observer the 
seeming jugglery that enthralls and deceives. 

On the other hand, covert or avowed skeptics, 
who reject Scriptural revelation and the priest- 
hood, are induced to venture into Spiritualism by 
its novelty, its mystery, and the possibility which 
it holds out of acquaintance at first hand with the 
laws and conditions of future life, if any there be. 
Numerous so-called infidels are Spiritualists ; in- 
deed, the tendency of infidelity is toward that 
path, and the number of unbelievers whose creed 
is annihilation is as small as the idea is almost 
universally repugnant. Spiritualism is the only 



Religious Skepticism and Spiritualism. 103 



asylum for the conscience that severs itself from 
Christian connections in their various forms, and 
whether Spiritualism will gradually supplant the 
old religions and become a grand archangelic 
faith, capable of sheltering mankind within the 
shadow of its wings, or whether it will prove to 
be nothing more than that which it now appears 
— a deceptive and alluring mirage — will be for 
future ages to ascertain. 



The End. 



Ancient and Medieval Republics. 



A 

REVIEW OF THEIR INSTITUTIONS 

AND OF THE 

Causes of Their Decline and Fall 

By henry MANN. 



A. S. Barnes & Co., New York. 

1879. 



" Mr. Mann's work on the history aucl fortuues of republics, ancient and 
mediaeval, is a book of much more elaborate character, of higher pretensions, 
and, we think, of much greater merit, than American scholarship commonly 
produces. It can hardly pretend to rank with such histories as those for 
which the world is indebted to Mr. Prescott, Mr. Motley, and one or two 
others of their countrymen, whose nationality is almost forgotten in the 
universality of their reputation. Emanating from an English iiniversity, it 
might rank rather wdth second-rate, than with first-rate books of the class to 
which it belongs. But in American historical literature the second-class 
scarcely exists ; between the classics of which we have spoken, and the multi- 
tude of works that hardly aspire above the rank of a college text-book, there 
is a vast and almost empty interval, and Mr. Mann's work must be placed 
much nearer to the higher than to the lower boundary of this unoccupied 
region. . . . The work before us has this especial value, that its 
method, at least, if not alwaj^s its treatment, brings to the reader's mind the 
fact so easily forgotten by Greek and Latin historians, and beaten by the foot- 
steps of their successors down to the present day, that, till the age of Alex- 
ander, Athens and Sparta were but the dominant cantons of a race which, if 
most skillful in war and in arts among its rivals, was yet one of the lesser 
powers of its time; that the Greece of Pericles and Agesilaus was but one 
member of the family of nations, and by no means the foremost ; and that, 
throughotit the early history, even of Rome, the Hellenic States of the East 
and of Sicily, the maritime States of Italy, had constantly before their eyes a 
rival, which, though less aggressive than most of its neighbors, was never- 
theless always a jealous neighbor, often a formidable enemy, and now and 
then a possible conqueror."— Sa^wrdftj/ Review, London, Eng., Sept. 25, 1880. 



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